story an air of verisimilitude. It was true
that, when Odette had just done something which she did not wish to
disclose, she would take pains to conceal it in a secret place in her
heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to
whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted
like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties
were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but would find only a void;
still, she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely
the fact which she had wished to conceal, which, being the truth, was
the one thing that had remained. She broke off from it a tiny fragment,
of no importance in itself, assuring herself that, after all, it was
the best thing to do, since it was a detail of the truth, and less
dangerous, therefore, than a falsehood. "At any rate, this is true,"
she said to herself; "that's always something to the good; he may make
inquiries; he will see that this is true; it won't be this, anyhow, that
will give me away." But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she
had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth
had sharp edges which could not: be made to fit in, except to those
contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily
detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she
might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and
by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was
elsewhere.

"She admits that she heard me ring, and then knock, that she knew it was
myself, that she wanted to see me," Swann thought to himself. "But that
doesn't correspond with the fact that she did not let me in."

He did not, however, draw her attention to this inconsistency, for he
thought that, if left to herself, Odette might perhaps produce some
falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth; she
spoke; he did not interrupt her, he gathered up, with an eager and
sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly
feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that,
like the veil of a sanctuary, they kept a vague imprint, traced a
faint outline of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable
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 divi