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By Root 1214 0

when you stoop to lying? Think how many faults you might redeem by a frank admission! You really are far less intelligent than I supposed!” In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have sueceeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she was simply content, whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of it. So that lying was for her an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of a specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann’s discovering that she had not told him the truth.

Physically, she was going through a bad phase; she was putting on weight, and the expressive, sorrowful charm, the surprised, wistful expression of old seemed to have vanished with her first youth. So that she had become most precious to Swann as it were just at the moment when he found her distinctly less good-looking. He would gaze at her searchingly, trying to recapture the charm which he had once seen in her, and no longer finding it. And yet the knowledge that within this new chrysalis it was still Odette who lurked, still the same fleeting, sly, elusive will, was enough to keep Swann seeking as passionately as ever to capture her. Then he would look at photographs of her taken two years before, and would remember how exquisite she had been. And that would console him a little for all the agony he suffered on her account.

When the Verdurins took her off to Saint-Germain, or to Chatou, or to Meulan, as often as not, if the weather was fine, they would decide to stay the night and return next day. Mme Verdurin would endeavour to set at rest the scruples of the pianist, whose aunt had remained in Paris: “She’ll be only too glad to be rid of you for a day. Why on earth should she be anxious, when she knows you’re with us? Anyhow, I’ll take full responsibility.”

If this attempt failed, M. Verdurin would set off across country to find a telegraph office or a messenger, after first finding out which of the “faithful” had someone they must notify. But Odette would thank him and assure him that she had no message for anyone, for she had told Swann once and for all that she could not possibly send messages to him, in front of all those people, without compromising herself. Sometimes she would be absent for several days on end, when the Verdurins took her to see the tombs at Dreux, or to Compiègne, on the painter’s advice, to watch the sunsets in the forest—after which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.

“To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly bombarded by people who really count to take them to Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of that she trundles off with the most abject brutes to go into ecstasies over the excrements of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge of art, I should say, to do that; surely, even without a particularly refined sense of smell, one doesn’t deliberately choose to spend a holiday in the latrines so as to be within range of their fragrant exhalations.”

But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds—alas, without allowing him to turn up there, as though by chance, for that, she said, “would create a deplorable impression”—he would plunge into the most intoxicating romance in the lover’s library, the railway time-table, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the afternoon, in the evening, even that very morning. The ways? More than that, the authority, the right to join her. For after all, the time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the public was informed, by means of the printed word, that at eight o’clock in the morning a train left for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was