the noble's rather than the flunkey's. What criterion
ought one to adopt, in order to judge one's fellows? After all, there
was not a single one of the people whom he knew who might not, in
certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action. Must he then
cease to see them all? His mind grew clouded; he passed his hands two
or three times across his brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief,
and remembering that, after all, men who were as good as himself
frequented the society of M. de Charlus, the Prince des Laumes and
the rest, he persuaded himself that this meant, if not that they were
incapable of shameful actions, at least that it was a necessity in human
life, to which everyone must submit, to frequent the society of people
who were, perhaps, not incapable of such actions. And he continued to
shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely
formal reservation that each one of them had, possibly, been seeking to
drive him to despair. As for the actual contents of the letter, they
did not disturb him; for in not one of the charges which it formulated
against Odette could he see the least vestige of fact. Like many other
men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and was slow in invention. He knew
quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but
in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or
her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the
part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the
light of what was revealed. At such times as he spent with Odette,
if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act committed, or
an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would
ruthlessly condemn the culprit by virtue of the same moral principles
which Swann had always heard expressed by his own parents, and to which
he himself had remained loyal; and then, she would arrange her flowers,
would sip her tea, would shew an interest in his work. So Swann extended
those habits to fill the rest of her life, he reconstructed those
actions when he wished to form a picture of the moments in which he and
she were apart. If anyone had portrayed her to him as she was, or rather
as she had been for so long with himself, but had substituted some
other man, he would have been distressed, for such a portrait would have
struck him as lifelike. But to suppose that she went to bad houses,
that she abandoned herself