hich, in the
church of Brou, because of her grief, her longing for him, Margaret of
Austria intertwined everywhere with her own. On some days, instead of
staying at home, he would go for luncheon to a restaurant not far off,
to which he had been attracted, some time before, by the excellence of
its cookery, but to which he now went only for one of those reasons,
at once mystical and absurd, which people call 'romantic'; because this
restaurant (which, by the way, still exists) bore the same name as the
street in which Odette lived: the Laperouse. Sometimes, when she had
been away on a short visit somewhere, several days would elapse before
she thought of letting him know that she had returned to Paris. And
then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have
taken) the precaution of covering herself, at all costs, with a little
fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just, at that very
moment, arrived by the morning train. What she said was a falsehood;
at least for Odette it was a falsehood, inconsistent, lacking (what it
would have had, if true) the support of her memory of her actual arrival
at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of
what she was saying, while she said it, by the contradictory picture, in
her mind, of whatever quite different thing she had indeed been doing at
the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train. In
Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled
and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so
indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had
come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been
convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or
hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette.
These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing
them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe
that she was lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was
also, however, sufficient. Given that, everything that Odette might say
appeared to him suspect. Did she mention a name: it was obviously that
of one of her lovers; once this supposition had taken shape, he would
spend weeks in tormenting himself; on one occasion he even approached a
firm of 'inquiry agents' to find out the address and the occupation of
the unknown rival who would give him no peace until