But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had
begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete
surrender, whether from fear of offending her, or from reluctance to
appear retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the
audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could
always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first
occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If
she had cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: "It's most
unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've
not been disturbed as they were the other night. I think, though, that
this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than
the others?" Or else, if she had none: "Oh! no cattleyas this evening;
then there's no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements."
So that for some time there was no change in the procedure which he had
followed on that first evening, starting with the fumblings with
fingers and lips at Odette's bosom, and it was thus that his caresses
still began. And long afterwords, when the rearrangement (or,
rather, the ritual pretence of a rearrangement) of her cattleyas had
quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted
into a simple verb which they would employ without thinking when they
wished to refer to the act of physical possesion (in which,
paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to
commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it
sprang. And perhaps this particular manner of saying "to make love"
did not mean exactly the same thing as its synonyms. However jaded we
may be about women, however much we may regard the possession of the
most divergent types as a repetitive and predictable experience, it
none the less becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women
concerned are -- or are thought by us to be -- so difficult as to
oblige us to make it spring from some unrehearsed incident in our
relations with them, as had originally been for Swann the arrangement
of the cattleyas. He tremblingly hoped, that evening (but Odette, he
told himself, if she was deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his
intention), that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge
for him from their large mauve petals; and the pleasure which he had
already felt and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps only
because she had not recognised it, seemed to him for that reason -- as
it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid the
flowers of the earthly paradise -- a pleasure which had never before
existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure -- as the
special name he gave it was to certify -- entirely individual and new.
-- Marcel Proust. Swann's Way (1913) p.331-332
(tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
revised by D. J. Enright -- 1992)