For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the winter there, and Swann
thought that it might indeed have been there, perhaps, that he had first
known Odette. The few words which some one had let fall, in his hearing,
about a man who, it appeared, had been Odette's lover, had left Swann dumb
foundered. But the very things which he would, before knowing them, have
regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe,
were, once he knew them, incorporated for all time in the general mass of
his sorrow; he admitted them, he could no longer have understood their not
existing. Only, each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line,
altering the picture that he had formed of his mistress. At one time
indeed he felt that he could understand that this moral 'lightness,' of
which he would never have suspected Odette, was perfectly well known, and
that at Baden or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several
months in one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous
notoriety. He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch
again with certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew
Odette, and, besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into
their heads, of setting them once more upon her track.
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