Page 562 - swanns-way

untruthfulness which makes you persist in denying things
which I know to be true. How can you expect that I shall
continue to love you, when I see you maintain, when I hear
you swear to me a thing which I know to be false? Odette,
do not prolong this moment which is torturing us both. If
you are willing to end it at once, you shall be free of it for
ever. Tell me, upon your medal, yes or no, whether you have
ever done those things.’
‘How on earth can I tell?’ she was furious. ‘Perhaps I
have, ever so long ago, when I didn’t know what I was do-
ing, perhaps two or three times.’
Swann had prepared himself for all possibilities. Reality
must, therefore, be something which bears no relation to
possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body
bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since
those words ‘two or three times’ carved, as it were, a cross
upon the living tissues of his heart. A strange thing, indeed,
that those words, ‘two or three times,’ nothing more than
a few words, words uttered in the air, at a distance, could
so lacerate a man’s heart, as if they had actually pierced it,
could sicken a man, like a poison that he had drunk. In-
stinctively Swann thought of the remark that he had heard
at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s: ‘I have never seen anything to
beat it since the table-turning.’ The agony that he now suf-
fered in no way resembled what he had supposed. Not only
because, in the hours when he most entirely mistrusted her,
he had rarely imagined such a culmination of evil, but be-
cause, even when he did imagine that offence, it remained
vague, uncertain, was not clothed in the particular horror

562 Swann’s Way