Swann's Way

(although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate
of its worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's
eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his
love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by
seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would
feel there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and
among people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure
as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were
depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used
to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the
smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the
soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in
Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of
daily life at Versailles, what Mme. de Maintenon ate and drank, or the
shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And in the small extent to which
this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which
Swann was tasting was that he could emigrate for a moment into those few