enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety.
He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch again with
certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette,
and, besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their
heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom,
up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that
pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that
he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those
pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been
solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no
longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any
moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and
dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had
been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's _Septennat_,
in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer
beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but
splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he
would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant
details that made up the daily round on the Cote d'Azur in those days,
if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled
him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does
the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century
Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the
Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit,
often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming;
and she would comment: "You do look sad!" It was not very long since,
from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best
women that he had known, he had passed to that of her being 'kept'; and
yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de
Crecy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-makers, to the 'ladies'
men' of Nice and Baden, to this face, the expression on which was so
often gentle, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself:
"What does it mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who
Odette de Crecy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they're true,
are always based upon other people's ideas"; he would reflect that this
legend--even if it were authentic--was something external to Odette,
was not