Page 575 - swanns-way

Verdurin that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came
late. There is always some excuse.’ From himself too, prob-
ably, many times when she had glibly uttered such words as
explain a delay or justify an alteration of the hour fixed for
a meeting, those moments must have hidden, without his
having the least inkling of it at the time, an engagement that
she had had with some other man, some man to whom she
had said: ‘I need only tell Swann that my dress wasn’t ready,
or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse.’ And
beneath all his most pleasant memories, beneath the sim-
plest words that Odette had ever spoken to him in those
old days, words which he had believed as though they were
the words of a Gospel, beneath her daily actions which she
had recounted to him, beneath the most ordinary places,
her dressmaker’s flat, the Avenue du Bois, the Hippodrome,
he could feel (dissembled there, by virtue of that temporal
superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how a
day has been spent, always leaves something over, that may
serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions),
he could feel the insinuation of a possible undercurrent
of falsehood which debased for him all that had remained
most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Pérouse
itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at
other hours than those of which she told him; extending the
power of the dark horror that had gripped him when he had
heard her admission with regard to the Maison Dorée, and,
like the obscene creatures in the ‘Desolation of Nineveh,’
shattering, stone by stone, the whole edifice of his past....
If, now, he turned aside whenever his memory repeated the

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