What she said was a falsehood;
at least for Odette it was a falsehood, inconsistent, lacking (what it
would have had, if true) the support of her memory of her actual arrival
at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of
what she was saying, while she said it, by the contradictory picture, in
her mind, of whatever quite different thing she had indeed been doing at
the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train. In
Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and
hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so
indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by
the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced
that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since
his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words
had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had
suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe that she was
lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was also, however,
sufficient.
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