Swann's Way

uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met
again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if
he had met my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk
things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to
throw a light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had
led, in the old days, at Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the
winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there,
perhaps, that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one
had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been
Odette's lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which he
would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to
learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them,
incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted
them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only,
each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the
picture that he had formed of his mistress. At one time indeed he felt
that he could understand that this moral 'lightness,' of which he would