four in the afternoon
He had for some time been feeling neither well nor happy , especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the Verdurins ' , and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in the country . But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris , even for a day , while Odette was there . The weather was warm ; it was the finest part of the spring . And for all that he was driving through a city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden , what was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned , near Combray , where , at four in the afternoon , before coming to the asparagus-bed , thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise , he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond , fringed with forget-me-not and iris ; and where , when he sat down to dinner , trained and twined by the gardener 's skilful hand , there ran all about his table currant-bush and rose . After dinner , if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at Saint-Cloud , he would rise from table and leave the house so abruptly -- especially if it threatened to rain , and so to scatter the ` faithful ' before their normal time -- that on one occasion the Princesse des Laumes -LRB- at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left before the coffee came in , to join the Verdurins on the Island in the Bois -RRB- observed : `` Really , if Swann were thirty years older , and had diabetes , there might be some excuse for his running away like that . He seems to look upon us all as a joke . '' He persuaded himself that the spring-time charm , which he could not go down to Combray to enjoy , he would find at least on the He des Cygnes or at Saint-Cloud .