your little Odette, you see, after all, though
people do say such dreadful things about her."

Besides, her very admissions--when she made any--of faults which she
supposed him to have discovered, rather served Swann as a starting-point
for fresh doubts than they put an end to the old. For her admissions
never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate
her confession of all its essential part, there would remain in the
accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined, which crushed
him anew, and was to enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his
jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His spirit carried
them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like
corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.

She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the
day of the Paris-Murcie Fete. "What! you knew him as long ago as that?
Oh, yes, of course you did," he corrected himself, so as not to shew
that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble
at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fete, when he had
received that letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had been
having luncheon, perhaps, with Forcheville at the Maison d'Or. She swore
that she had not. "Still, the Maison d'Or reminds me of something or
other which, I knew at the time, wasn't true," he pursued, hoping to
frighten her. "Yes that I hadn't been there at all that evening when I
told you I had just come from there, and you had been looking for me
at Prevost's," she replied (judging by his manner that he knew) with a
firmness that was based not so much upon cynicism as upon timidity, a
fear of crossing Swann, which her own self-respect made her anxious to
conceal, and a desire to shew him that she could be perfectly frank if
she chose. And so she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a
headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty,
since she was quite unconscious of hurting him; she even began to laugh,
though this may perhaps, it is true, have been chiefly to keep him from
thinking that she was ashamed, at all, or confused. "It's quite true, I
hadn't been to the Maison Doree. I was coming away from Forcheville's. I
had, really, been to Prevost's--that wasn't a story--and he met me there
and asked me to come in and look at his prints. But some one else came
to see him. I told you that I was coming from the M