Swann's Way

in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had
found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with
this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette
alone. He could feel reawakening in himself the inspirations of his
boyhood, which had been dissipated among the frivolities of his later
life, but they all bore, now, the reflection, the stamp of a particular
being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure
in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit, he became
gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.

He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent
her time during the day, any more than he knew of her past; so little,
indeed, that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing
us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
And so he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life
had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years
earlier, when he still did not know her, some one had spoken to him of a
woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette,