In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [225]
Swann knew that Odette would never perjure herself on that.
“Oh, you do make me so miserable,” she cried, with a jerk of her body as though to shake herself free of the constraint of his question. “Haven’t you had enough? What’s the matter with you today? You seem determined to make me hate you. I wanted to be friends with you again, for us to have a nice time together, like the old days; and this is all the thanks I get!”
However, he would not let her go but sat there like a surgeon waiting for a spasm to subside that has interrupted his operation but will not make him abandon it.
“You’re quite wrong to suppose that I’d bear you the least ill-will in the world, Odette,” he said to her with a persuasive and deceitful gentleness. “I never speak to you except of what I already know, and I always know a great deal more than I say. But you alone can mitigate by your confession what makes me hate you so long as it has been reported to me only by other people. My anger with you has nothing to do with your actions—I can and do forgive you everything because I love you—but with your untruthfulness, the ridiculous untruthfulness which makes you persist in denying things which I know to be true. How can you expect me to go on loving you when I see you maintain, when I hear you swear to me a thing which I know to be false? Odette, don’t prolong this moment which is agony for us both. If you want to, you can end it in a second, you’ll be free of it for ever. Tell me, on your medal, yes or no, whether you have ever done these things.”
“How on earth do I know?” she exclaimed angrily. “Perhaps I have, ever so long ago, when I didn’t know what I was doing, perhaps two or three times.”
Swann had prepared himself for every possibility. Reality must therefore be something that bears no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since those words, “two or three times,” carved as it were a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. Strange indeed that those words, “two or three times,” nothing more than words, words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man’s heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could make a man ill, like a poison he has drunk. Instinctively Swann thought of the remark he had heard at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s: “I’ve never seen anything to beat it since the table-turning.” The agony that he now suffered in no way resembled what he had supposed. Not only because, even in his moments of most complete distrust, he had rarely imagined such an extremity of evil, but because, even when he did try to imagine this thing, it remained vague, uncertain, was not clothed in the particular horror which had sprung from the words “perhaps two or three times,” was not armed with that specific cruelty, as different from anything that he had known as a disease by which one is struck down for the first time. And yet this Odette from whom all this evil sprang was no less dear to him, was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased, the price of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman alone possessed, increased at the same time. He wanted to devote more care to her, as one tends a disease which one has suddenly discovered to be more serious. He wanted the horrible things which, she had told him, she had done “two or three times,” not to happen again. To ensure that, he must watch over Odette. People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his attachment to her, because he does not believe you; yet how much more if he does! But, Swann asked himself, how could he manage to protect her? He might perhaps be able to preserve her from the contamination of a particular woman, but there were hundreds of others; and he realised what madness had come over him when, on the evening when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins’, he had begun to desire the possession—as if that were ever possible—of another person. Happily for Swann,