The weighing of evidence: in search of the truth

Swann hears rumors about Odette and how she passes her time, but he fails to believe it.

"Reflections of this sort had brought him back to the memory of a time when someone had spoken to him of Odette as of a kept woman, and he was amusing himself once again with contrasting that strange personification, the kept woman...with the Odette on whose face he had seen the same expression of pity for a sufferer, revolt against an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness, which he had seen in earlier days on his own mother's face and on the faces of his friends... If gossip about such things were repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant."

"He was not jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette might have played him false."

Swann cannot ignore her strange behavior and her inability to account for her time. He presses her.

"As soon as she found herself face to face with the man to whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but could only find a void; yet she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely the fact which she had wished to conceal and which, being the truth, was the one thing that remained."

Swann wishes to procure the truth.

"...the curiosity which [Swann] now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of [Odette's] daily life was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all the manner of actions from which hitherto he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments — so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth."