Verdurin, that is to say that each step took him farther from Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately after Odette. “They had obviously arranged it between them,” he added; “they must have agreed to meet at the foot of the cliff, but they wouldn’t say goodbye together; it might have looked odd. She is his mistress.” The strange young man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to console him. “After all, she is quite right,” he said to the young man, drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more at ease. “I’ve advised her to do that, myself, a dozen times. Why be so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her.” So Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the “first person” in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped with a fez.