Page 439 - swanns-way

still there, heartbroken, bewildered, and yet happy; gazing
at this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a
scruple, so absolute was her trust in his honour; through its
transparent window there had been disclosed to him, with
the secret history of an incident which he had despaired of
ever being able to learn, a fragment of the life of Odette,
seen as through a narrow, luminous incision, cut into its
surface without her knowledge. Then his jealousy rejoiced
at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an inde-
pendent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every
thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of
Swann himself. Now it had food in store, and Swann could
begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening, over the visits
that Odette had received about five o’clock, and could seek
to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For
Swann’s affection for Odette still preserved the form which
had been imposed on it, from the beginning, by his igno-
rance of the occupations in which she passed her days, as
well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him from
supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not
jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette’s life, but of those
moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps
misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette might
have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus which
throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle,
fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock
in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But
Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were
only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had

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