Page 566 - swanns-way

You had been dining with the Princesse des Laumes,’ she
added, happy to be able to furnish him with an exact detail,
which testified to her veracity. ‘At the next table there was a
woman whom I hadn’t seen for ever so long. She said to me,
‘Come along round behind the rock, there, and look at the
moonlight on the water!’ At first I just yawned, and said,
‘No, I’m too tired, and I’m quite happy where I am, thank
you.’ She swore there’d never been anything like it in the
way of moonlight. ‘I’ve heard that tale before,’ I said to her;
you see, I knew quite well what she was after.’ Odette narrat-
ed this episode almost as if it were a joke, either because it
appeared to her to be quite natural, or because she thought
that she was thereby minimising its importance, or else so
as not to appear ashamed. But, catching sight of Swann’s
face, she changed her tone, and:
‘You are a fiend!’ she flung at him, ‘you enjoy torment-
ing me, making me tell you lies, just so that you’ll leave me
in peace.’
This second blow struck at Swann was even more ex-
cruciating than the first. Never had he supposed it to have
been so recent an affair, hidden from his eyes that had been
too innocent to discern it, not in a past which he had nev-
er known, but in evenings which he so well remembered,
which he had lived through with Odette, of which he had
supposed himself to have such an intimate, such an exhaus-
tive knowledge, and which now assumed, retrospectively,
an aspect of cunning and deceit and cruelty. In the midst of
them parted, suddenly, a gaping chasm, that moment on the
Island in the Bois de Boulogne. Without being intelligent,

566 Swann’s Way