Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [228]
Poor Odette! He did not hold it against her. She was only half to blame. Had he not been told that it was her own mother who had sold her, when she was still hardly more than a child, at Nice, to a wealthy Englishman? But what an agonising truth was now contained for him in those lines of Alfred de Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète which he had previously read without emotion: “When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one should say to oneself, ‘Who are the people around her? What kind of life has she led?’ All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.” Swann was astonished that such simple sentences, spelt over in his mind, as “I’ve heard that tale before” or “I knew quite well what she was after,” could cause him so much pain. But he realised that what he thought of as simple sentences were in fact the components of the framework which still enclosed, and could inflict on him again, the anguish he had felt while Odette was telling her story. For it was indeed the same anguish that he now was feeling anew. For all that he now knew—for all that, as time went on, he might even have partly forgotten and forgiven—whenever he repeated her words his old anguish refashioned him as he had been before Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might be pierced by Odette’s admission, in the position of a man who does not yet know; and after several months this old story would still shatter him like a sudden revelation. He marvelled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age, that he could hope for a relaxation of his torments. But, as soon as the power of any one of Odette’s remarks to make Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one of those to which he had hitherto paid little attention, almost a new observation, came to reinforce the others and to strike at him with undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with the Princesse des Laumes was painful to him, but it was no more than the centre, the core of his pain, which radiated vaguely round about it, overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever point in it his memory sought to linger, it was the whole of that season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine on the Island in the Bois, that racked him. So violently that by slow degrees the curiosity which his jealousy aroused in him was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures he would be inflicting upon himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that the entire period of Odette’s life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form a picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest that past of hers, colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible and monstrous form, an individual and diabolical countenance. And he continued to refrain from seeking to visualise it, no longer from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day, he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois or the Princesse des Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of the old heartache; and meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him with new facts, the names of more places and different circumstances which, when his malady was still scarcely healed, would revive it again in another form.
But, often enough, the things that he did know, that he dreaded, now, to learn, were revealed to him by Odette herself, spontaneously and unwittingly; for the gap which her vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from