• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1383 0

yet could not be charged with cruelty since she was quite unconscious of hurting him; she even laughed, though perhaps, it is true, chiefly in order not to appear chastened or embarrassed. “It’s quite true, I hadn’t been to the Maison Dorée. I was coming away from Forcheville’s. I really had been to Prévost’s—I didn’t make that up—and he met me there and asked me to come in and look at his prints. But someone else came to see him. I told you I’d come from the Maison Dorée because I was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really, don’t you see? Even if I did wrong, at least I’m telling you all about it now, aren’t I? What would I have to gain by not telling you that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, if it was true? Especially as at the time we didn’t know one another quite so well as we do now, did we, darling?”

He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the shattered creature which these crushing words had made of him. So, even in the months of which he had never dared to think again because they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening on which they had “done a cattleya”) when she had told him that she was coming from the Maison Dorée, how many others must there have been, each of them also concealing a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He recalled how she had said to him once: “I need only tell Mme Verdurin that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There’s always some excuse.” From himself too, probably, many a time when she had glibly uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the hour fixed for a meeting, they must have hidden, without his having the least inkling of it at the time, an appointment she had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: “I need only tell Swann that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There’s always some excuse.” And beneath all his most tender memories, beneath the simplest words that Odette had spoken to him in those early days, words which he had believed as though they were gospel, beneath the daily actions which she had recounted to him, beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker’s flat, the Avenue du Bois, the race-course, he could feel (dissembled by virtue of that temporal superfluity which, even in days that have been most circumstantially accounted for, still leaves a margin of room that may serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of a possible undercurrent of falsehood which rendered ignoble all that had remained most precious to him (his happiest evenings, the Rue La Pérouse itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours than those of which she told him) everywhere disseminating something of the shadowy horror that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to the Maison Dorée, and, like the obscene creatures in the “Desolation of Nineveh,” shattering stone by stone the whole edifice of his past … If, now, he turned away whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of the Maison Dorée, it was because that name recalled to him no longer, as, but recently, at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s party, a happiness which he had long since lost, but a misfortune of which he had just become aware. Then it happened with the Maison Dorée as it had happened with the Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him. For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those