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drove members of the aristocracy. In a word, this anony-
mous letter proved that he himself knew a human being
capable of the most infamous conduct, but he could see no
reason why that infamy should lurk in the depths—which
no strange eye might explore—of the warm heart rather
than the cold, the artist’s rather than the business-man’s,
the noble’s rather than the flunkey’s. What criterion ought
one to adopt, in order to judge one’s fellows? After all, there
was not a single one of the people whom he knew who might
not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful
action. Must he then cease to see them all? His mind grew
clouded; he passed his hands two or three times across his
brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief, and remem-
bering that, after all, men who were as good as himself
frequented the society of M. de Charlus, the Prince des
Laumes and the rest, he persuaded himself that this meant,
if not that they were incapable of shameful actions, at least
that it was a necessity in human life, to which everyone
must submit, to frequent the society of people who were,
perhaps, not incapable of such actions. And he continued to
shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected,
with the purely formal reservation that each one of them
had, possibly, been seeking to drive him to despair. As for
the actual contents of the letter, they did not disturb him;
for in not one of the charges which it formulated against
Odette could he see the least vestige of fact. Like many other
men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and was slow in in-
vention. He knew quite well as a general truth, that human
life is full of contrasts, but in the case of any one human be-

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