Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [185]
Sometimes, when she had been away on a short visit somewhere, several days would elapse before she thought of letting him know that she had returned to Paris. And then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have taken) the precaution of covering herself, just in case, with a little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had at that very moment arrived by the morning train. These words were mendacious; at least for Odette they were mendacious, insubstantial, lacking (what they would have had if true) a basis of support in her memory of her actual arrival at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of them as she uttered them, by the contradictory picture of whatever quite different thing she had been doing at the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train. In Swann’s mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann was convinced that it was the friend who had mistaken the day or the hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words would have appeared to him false only if he had suspected beforehand that they were going to be. For him to be believe that she was lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was also, however, sufficient. Given that, everything Odette said appeared to him suspect. If she mentioned a name, it was obviously that of one of her lovers, and once this supposition had taken shape, he would spend weeks tormenting himself. On one occasion he even approached an inquiry agent to find out the address and the occupation of the unknown rival who would give him no peace until he could be proved to have gone abroad, and who (he ultimately learned) was an uncle of Odette who had been dead for twenty years.
Although she would not allow him as a rule to meet her in public, saying that people would talk, it happened occasionally that, at an evening party to which he and she had both been invited—at Forcheville’s, at the painter’s, or at a charity ball given in one of the Ministries—he found himself in the same room with her. He could see her, but dared not stay for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures she enjoyed in other company, pleasures which—as he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed as miserable as I was to be some years later on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray—seemed to him limitless since he had not seen the end of them. And once or twice he experienced on such evenings the sort of happiness which one would be inclined (did it not originate in so violent a reaction from an anxiety abruptly terminated) to call peaceful, since it consists in a pacifying of the mind. On one occasion he had looked in for a moment at a party in the painter’s studio, and was preparing to go home, leaving behind him Odette transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to hint at some voluptuous pleasures to be enjoyed there or elsewhere (possibly at the Bal des Incohérents, to which he trembled to think that she might be going on afterwards) which caused Swann more jealousy than the carnal act itself, since he found it more difficult to imagine; he was already at the door when he heard himself called back in these words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which had so appalled him, made it seem innocent in retrospect, made Odette’s return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but tender and familiar, a thing that would stay beside him, like a part of his daily life, in his carriage, and stripped Odette herself of the excess of brilliance