ne 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 hi 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
regard that curiosity as important, and to take every possible step
to satisfy it. Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of
which--supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as
well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life,
the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, in which one's
intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's
disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable was to be
discovered, except the individual tastes of each of its members--is no
longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the
philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspirations upon external
objects, endeavour to separate from the accumulation of the years
already spent a definite residue of habits and passions which they
can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will
deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence
which they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed
it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived
from not knowing what Odette had done, just as he made allowance for the
impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate
in his budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring, with
regard to the daily occupations of Odette, information the lack of
which would make him unhappy, just as he reserved a margin fo