later he went on: “Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece of art, as—oh, I don’t know—” and he laughed, “shall we say the Queens of Chartres?” Until then I had supposed that this horror of having to give a serious opinion was something Parisian and refined, in contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother’s sisters; and I imagined also that it was characteristic of the mental attitude of the circle in which Swann moved, where, by a natural reaction from the lyrical enthusiasms of earlier generations, an excessive importance was now given to precise and petty facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the nature of “phrase-making” was proscribed. But now I found myself slightly shocked by this attitude of Swann’s. He appeared unwilling even to risk having an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise detail. But did he not realise that to postulate that the accuracy of his information was of some importance was tantamount to professing an opinion? I thought again of the dinner that night when I had been so unhappy because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and when he had dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being of no importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he devoted his life. I found all this contradictory. What other life did he set apart for saying in all seriousness what he thought about things, for formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas, and for no longer indulging with punctilious politeness in occupations which at the same time he professed to find absurd? I noticed, too, in the manner in which Swann spoke to me of Bergotte, something which, to do him justice, was not peculiar to himself, but was shared at the time by all that writer’s admirers, including my mother’s friend and Dr du Boulbon. Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: “He has a delightful mind, so individual, he has a way of his own of saying things, which is a little far-fetched, but so agreeable. You never need to look for the signature, you can tell his work at once.” But none of them would go so far as to say “He’s a great writer, he has great talent.” They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realise that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.
“Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?” I asked M. Swann.
“I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of print. Still, perhaps there has been a second impression. I’ll find out. In fact I can ask Bergotte himself all you want to know next time he comes to dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year’s end to another. He’s my daughter’s greatest friend. They go and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles together.”
As I was still completely ignorant of the social hierarchy, the fact that my father found it impossible for us to see anything of Swann’s wife and daughter had for a long time had the effect, in making me imagine them as separated from us by an enormous gulf, of enhancing their prestige in my eyes. I was sorry that my mother did not dye her hair and redden her lips, as I had heard our neighbour Mme Sazerat say that Mme Swann did, to gratify not her husband but M. de Charlus; and I felt that, to her, we must be an object of scorn, which distressed me particularly on account of the daughter, such a pretty little girl, as I had heard, of whom I used often to dream, ascribing to her each time the same arbitrarily chosen and enchanting features. But when, that day, I learned that Mlle Swann was a creature living in such rare and fortunate circumstances, bathed,