• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1316 0

having any suspicion of his vices, has no gauge at hand from which to ascertain how far those vices, whose continuous growth is imperceptible to himself, have gradually segregated him from the normal ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette’s mind, side by side with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swann, others were gradually coloured, infected by them, without her being able to detect anything strange in them, without their causing any jarring note in the particular surroundings which they occupied in her inner world; but if she related them to Swann, he was shattered by the revelation of the way of life to which they pointed. One day he was trying—without hurting Odette—to discover from her whether she had ever had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a matter of fact, convinced that she had not; the anonymous letter had put the idea into his mind, but in a mechanical way; it had met with no credence there, but for all that had remained, and Swann, wishing to be rid of the purely material but none the less burdensome presence of the suspicion, hoped that Odette would now extirpate it for ever.

“Oh, no!… Not that they don’t pester me,” she added with a smile of self-satisfied vanity, quite unaware that it could not appear justifiable to Swann. “There was one of them waited more than two hours for me yesterday—offered me any money I asked. It seems there’s an ambassador who said to her, ‘I’ll kill myself if you don’t bring her to me.’ They told her I’d gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go and speak to her myself before she’d go away. I wish you could have seen the way I went for her; my maid could hear me from the next room and told me I was shouting at the top of my voice: ‘But haven’t I told you I don’t want to! It’s just the way I feel. I should hope I’m still free to do as I please! If I needed the money, I could understand …’ The porter has orders not to let her in again; he’s to tell her I’m out of town. Oh, I wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room while I was talking to her. I know you’d have been pleased, my darling. There’s some good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though people do say such dreadful things about her.”

Besides, her very admissions—when she made any—of faults which she supposed him to have discovered, served Swann as a starting-point for new doubts rather than putting an end to the old. For her admissions never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate her confession of all its essentials, there would remain in the accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined, which crushed him anew, and would enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His soul carried them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.

She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. “What! you knew him as long ago as that? Oh, yes, of course you did,” he corrected himself, so as not to show that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, when he had received from her the letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had perhaps been having lunch with Forcheville at the Maison Dorée. She swore that she had not. “Still, the Maison Dorée reminds me of something or other which I knew at the time wasn’t true,” he pursued, hoping to frighten her. “Yes, that I hadn’t been there at all that evening when I told you I had just come from there, and you’d been looking for me at Prévost’s,” she replied (judging by his manner that he knew) with a firmness that was based not so much on cynicism as on timidity, a fear of offending Swann which her own self-respect made her anxious to conceal, and a desire to show him that she could be perfectly frank if she chose. And so she struck with all the precision and force of a headsman wielding his axe, and