But he, to whom, up
till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained
to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that he learned that
Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those pleasure-cities,
although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a
want of money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from some
capricious instinct which might, at any moment, revive in her, he would
lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and dizzy, over the bottomless abyss
into which had passed, in which had been engulfed those years of his own,
early in MacMahon's _Septennat_, in which one spent the winter on the
Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would
find in those years a sad but splendid profundity, such as a poet might
have lent to them; and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all
the insignificant details that made up the daily round on the Cote d'Azur
in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something that
still baffled him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm
than does the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of
fifteenth-century Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the
soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.
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