could hope for a relaxation of his torments.
But, as soon as the power that any one of Odette's sentences had to make
Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one
of those to which he had hitherto paid least attention, almost a
new sentence, came to relieve the first, and to strike at him with
undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with
the Princesse des Laumes was painful to him, but it was no more than
the centre, the core of his pain. That radiated vaguely round about it,
overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever
point in it he might intend his memory to rest, it was the whole of that
season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine upon the
Island in the Bois, that sprang back to hurt him. So violently, that by
slow degrees the curiosity which his jealousy was ever exciting in him
was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures which he would be
inflicting upon himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that all
the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him,
a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind,
was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had
consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete
incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past,
now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an
obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued
to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from
laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day,
he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois, or the Princesse des
Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of that old rending pain;
meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him
with fresh sentences, with the names of more places and people and of
different events, which, when his malady was still scarcely healed,
would make it break out again in another form.

But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that he dreaded,
now, to learn, it was Odette herself who, spontaneously and without
thought of what she did, revealed them to him; for the gap which her
vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life
which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead,
was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, alwa