that my uncle was the same as other men: he had tried to take her by force. She calmed Swann down when he wanted to rush out to challenge my uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if he had met my uncle Adolphe again a few times and had contrived to talk things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to throw light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had formerly led in Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there that he had first known Odette. The few words which someone had let fall in his hearing about a man who, it appeared, had been Odette’s lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which, before knowing them, he would have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them, absorbed for ever into the general mass of his gloom; he accepted them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only, each one of them added a new and indelible touch to the picture he had formed of his mistress. At one point indeed he was given to understand that this moral laxity of which he would never have suspected Odette was fairly well known, and that at Baden or Nice, when she used to go to spend several months in one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety. He thought of getting in touch with one or two pleasure-seekers and interrogating them; but they were aware that he knew Odette, and besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom nothing could have seemed more tedious hitherto than all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, having learned that Odette had perhaps once led a gay life in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a need for money which, thanks to him, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might at any moment revive in her, now leaned in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish over the bottomless abyss in which those early years of MacMahon’s Presidency had been engulfed, years during which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and he would find in them a painful but magnificent profundity, such as a poet might have lent them; indeed he would have devoted to the reconstruction of the petty details of social life on the Côte d’Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something of Odette’s smile and the look in her eyes—candid and simple though they were—as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.
Often he would sit, without saying a word, gazing at her dreamily, and she would say: “You do look sad!” It was not very long since he had switched from the idea that she was a really good person, comparable to the nicest he had known, to that of her being a kept woman; conversely, it had happened to him since to revert from the Odette de Crécy who was perhaps too well known to the roisterers, the ladies’ men, to this face whose expression was often so gentle and sweet, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself: “What does it mean, after all, if everyone at Nice knows who Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they’re true, are always based upon other people’s ideas”; he would reflect that this legend—even if it was authentic—was something extraneous to Odette, was not an innate, pernicious and ineradicable part of her personality; that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a docile body which he had clasped in his arms and explored with his hands, a woman whom he might one day come to possess absolutely, if he succeeded in