Swann's Way

Bois-de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he
had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carrying her cloak when she
was too warm; and in the evening, after dinner, if she wished to stay at
home, and not to dress, if he had been forced to stay beside her, to
do what she asked; then how completely would all the trivial details
of Swann's life, which seemed to him now so gloomy, simply because they
would, at the same time, have formed part of the life of Odette, have
taken on--like that lamp, that orangeade, that armchair, which had
absorbed so much of his dreams, which materialised so much of his
longing,--a sort of superabundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity.

And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much
longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have created an atmosphere
favourable to his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature
always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her
was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by
the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection and gratitude, when
those normal relations were established between them which would put an