Page 468 - swanns-way

to the station would consent (no matter how great the bribe)
to smuggle her to some place where she could be kept for a
time in seclusion, that perfidious woman, her eyes tinselled
with a smile of complicity for Forcheville, which was what
Odette had become for Swann in the last forty-eight hours.
But she was never that for very long; after a few days the
shining, crafty eyes lost their brightness and their duplicity,
that picture of an execrable Odette saying to Forcheville:
‘Look at him storming!’ began to grow pale and to dissolve.
Then gradually reappeared and rose before him, softly radi-
ant, the face of the other Odette, of that Odette who al^o
turned with a smile to Forcheville, but with a smile in which
there was nothing but affection for Swann, when she said:
‘You mustn’t stay long, for this gentleman doesn’t much like
my having visitors when he’s here. Oh! if you only knew
the creature as I know him!’ that same smile with which
she used to thank Swann for some instance of his courtesy
which she prized so highly, for some advice for which she
had asked him in one of those grave crises in her life, when
she could turn to him alone.
Then, to this other Odette, he would ask himself what
could have induced him to write that outrageous letter, of
which, probably, until then, she had never supposed him ca-
pable, a letter which must have lowered him from the high,
from the supreme place which, by his generosity, by his
loyalty, he had won for himself in her esteem. He would be-
come less dear to her, since it was for those qualities, which
she found neither in Forcheville nor in any other, that she
loved him. It was for them that Odette so often shewed him

468 Swann’s Way