Swann's Way

truth;--what she had been doing, that afternoon, at three o'clock, when
he had called,--a truth of which he would never possess any more than
these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, a truth which would
exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this creature, who
would contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value, but would never
yield it up to him. It was true that he had, now and then, a strong
suspicion that Odette's daily activities were not in themselves
passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with
other men did not exhale, naturally, in a universal sense, or for every
rational being, a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with
fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised, at such moments, that that
interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist, and
that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses
that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as
those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful
curiosity with which Swann now studied them had its origin only in
himself was not enough to make him decide that it was unreasonable to