Page 485 - swanns-way

had been Odette’s lover, had left Swann dumb foundered.
But the very things which he would, before knowing them,
have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most im-
possible to believe, were, once he knew them, incorporated
for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted
them, he could no longer have understood their not exist-
ing. Only, each one of them in its passage traced an indelible
line, altering the picture that he had formed of his mistress.
At one time indeed he felt that he could understand that
this moral ‘lightness,’ of which he would never have sus-
pected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden
or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several
months in one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of
amorous notoriety. He attempted, in order to question
them, to get into touch again with certain men of that
stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette, and, be-
sides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their
heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to
whom, up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as
was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or
of Nice, now that he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a
‘gay’ life once in those pleasure-cities, although he could
never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of
money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from
some capricious instinct which might, at any moment, re-
vive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and
dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in
which had been engulfed those years of his own, early in
MacMahon’s Septennat, in which one spent the winter on

485