aison d'Or because I
was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really,
don't you see? I admit, I did wrong, but at least I'm telling you all
about it now, a'n't I? What have I to gain by not telling you, straight,
that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fete, if it were
true? Especially as at that time we didn't know one another quite so
well as we do now, did we, dear?"

He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the utterly
spiritless creature which these crushing words had made of him. And so,
even in the months of which he had never dared to think again, because
they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was
already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening on which
they had "done a cattleya") when she had told him that she was coming
from the Maison Doree, how many others must there have been, each
of them covering a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He
recalled how she had said to him once: "I need only tell Mme. Verdurin
that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always
some excuse." From himself too, probably, many times when she had glibly
uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the
hour fixed for a meeting, those moments must have hidden, without his
having the least inkling of it at the time, an engagement that she had
had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: "I need only
tell Swann that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There
is always some excuse." And beneath all his most pleasant memories,
beneath the simplest words that Odette had ever spoken to him in those
old days, words which he had believed as though they were the words of
a Gospel, beneath her daily actions which she had recounted to him,
beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's flat, the Avenue du
Bois, the Hippodrome, he could feel (dissembled there, by virtue of that
temporal superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how a day
has been spent, always leaves something over, that may serve as a hiding
place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of
a possible undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that
had remained most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Perouse
itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours
than those of which she told him; extending the power of the dark horror
t