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By Root 1302 0

it deep down inside herself. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but could find only a void; yet she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely the fact which she had wished to conceal and which, being the truth, was the one thing that had remained. She broke off from it a tiny fragment, of no importance in itself, assuring herself that, after all, it was the best thing to do, since it was a verifiable detail and less dangerous, therefore, than a fictitious one. “At any rate, that’s true,” she said to herself, “which is something to the good. He may make inquiries, and he’ll see that it’s true, so at least it won’t be that that gives me away.” But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had failed to realise that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except with those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to show, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps she had forgotten to fill in, that its proper place was elsewhere.

“She admits that she heard me ring and then knock, that she knew it was me, and that she wanted to see me,” Swann thought to himself. “But that doesn’t fit in with the fact that she didn’t let me in.”

He did not, however, draw her attention to this inconsistency, for he thought that if left to herself Odette might perhaps produce some falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth. She went on speaking, and he did not interrupt her, but gathered up, with an eager and sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that, like the sacred veil, they retained a vague imprint, traced a faint outline, of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable reality—what she had been doing that afternoon at three o’clock when he had called—of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, and which would exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this woman who could contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value but would never yield it up to him. Of course it occurred to him from time to time that Odette’s daily activities were not in themselves passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with other men did not exhale naturally, universally and for every rational being a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised at such moments that that interest, that gloom, existed in him alone, like a disease, and that once he was cured of this disease, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful curiosity which he now brought to them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make Swann decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curiosity as important and to take every possible step to satisfy it. The fact was that Swann had reached an age whose philosophy—encouraged, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent much of his life, the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to the degree of scepticism and nothing was considered real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person—is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accumulation of the years already spent a fixed residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which