The author utilises the potency of suspense to bring Swann's ardour to the boiling point. One evening when Odette had avoided him he searched the restaurants of the Boulevards in a state of increasing panic.
“Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.”
He proceeded to cultivate his love in an emotional medium and to inoculate himself with the culture which rendered him immune to love of another. The culture medium was furnished by Vinteuil, the old composer, who had died of a broken heart. “He would make Odette play him the phrase from the sonata again ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him.”
“Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anæsthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply.”
The effect that it had was deep repose, mysterious refreshment. He felt himself transformed into a “creature foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears alone.”
Swann's discovery of the spiritual and bodily inconstancies of his mistress, the perfidies and betrayals of the Verdurins, his jealousy, planned resentments, and resurrection are related in a way that convinces us that Proust saw life steadily and saw it whole.
To appease his anguish, to thwart his obsession, to supplant his preoccupation he decided to frequent again the aristocratic circles he had forsaken. The description of the reception at Mme. de Saint Euverte's, showing the details of fashionable life, is of itself a noteworthy piece of writing. Not only is it replete with accurate knowledge of such society, but it gives M. Proust the opportunity to display understanding of motives and frailties and to record impressions of contact with the world abroad. Speaking of one of the guests he says:
“She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels about people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does.”
The peculiar tendency which Swann always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here in a more positive and more general form. One of the footmen was not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures, and the like. Another reminded him of the decorative warriors one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings. “He seemed as determined to remain as unconcerned as if he had been present at the massacre of the innocents or the martyrdom of St. James.” As he entered the salon one reminded him of Giotto's models, another of Albert Dürer's, another of that Greek sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, while a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pig-tail clubbed at the back of his head seemed like one of Goya's sacristans.
It was this soirée that conditioned irrevocably Swann's future life, and the little phrase from Vinteuil's Sonata did it for him. To have heard it “in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent” made him suffer insupportably. While listening to it