Page 573 - swanns-way

faults which she supposed him to have discovered, rather
served Swann as a starting-point for fresh doubts than they
put an end to the old. For her admissions never exactly co-
incided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate
her confession of all its essential part, there would remain
in the accessories something which Swann had never yet
imagined, which crushed him anew, and was to enable him
to alter the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these
admissions he could never forget. His spirit carried them
along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bo-
som, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.
She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid
her on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. ‘What! you knew
him as long ago as that? Oh, yes, of course you did,’ he cor-
rected himself, so as not to shew that he had been ignorant
of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought
that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, when he had re-
ceived that letter which he had so carefully preserved, she
had been having luncheon, perhaps, with Forcheville at the
Maison d’Or. She swore that she had not. ‘Still, the Maison
d’Or reminds me of something or other which, I knew at
the time, wasn’t true,’ he pursued, hoping to frighten her.
‘Yes that I hadn’t been there at all that evening when I told
you I had just come from there, and you had been look-
ing for me at Prévost’s,’ she replied (judging by his manner
that he knew) with a firmness that was based not so much
upon cynicism as upon timidity, a fear of crossing Swann,
which her own self-respect made her anxious to conceal,
and a desire to shew him that she could be perfectly frank

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