But were he to learn more of them,
he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might
assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical
features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not
any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped
that, some day, he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois, or the
Princesse des Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of that old
rending pain; meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into
furnishing him with fresh sentences, with the names of more places and
people and of different events, which, when his malady was still scarcely
healed, would make it break out again in another form.
But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that he dreaded, now,
to learn, it was Odette herself who, spontaneously and without thought of
what she did, revealed them to him; for the gap which her vices made
between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann
had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was far wider
than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same air of virtue
before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any suspicion of his
vices, has no register, no gauge at hand from which he may ascertain bow
far those vices (their continuous growth being imperceptible by himself)
have gradually segregated him from the normal ways of life.
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