no conception of which could possibly be formed. "I should
like to speak to you about her," he went on, "you, who know what a woman
supreme above all women, what an adorable being, what an angel Odette
is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris. Everyone doesn't see
Odette in the light in which you and I have been Privileged to see her.
And so there are people who think that I am behaving rather foolishly;
she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors, at the theatre. Now
you, in whom she has such enormous confidence, couldn't you say a few
words for me to her, just to assure her that she exaggerate the harm
which my bowing to her in the street might do her?"

My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she
would love him all the more; he advised Odette to let Swann meet he;
everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told
Swann that she had just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that
my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by assault.
She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my
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 dumb foundered. 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
never have suspected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden
or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several months in
one or the other place, she had