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By Root 1484 0

shade, in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, he had listened on so many evenings to the little phrase. In place of the profound meaning that he had so often sought in it, what it now recalled to Swann were the leafy boughs, ordered, wreathed, painted round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self, as it were their soul), was the whole of one spring season which he had not been able to enjoy at the time, not having had—feverish and sad as he then was—the requisite physical and mental well-being, and which (as one puts by for an invalid the dainties that he has not been able to eat) it had kept for him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteuil’s sonata served to remind him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had been merely by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him, and so had seen nothing—nor would have, had she been a thousand times as comprehending—of that vision which for none of us (or at least I was long under the impression that this rule admitted of no exception) can be externalised.

“It’s rather a charming thought, don’t you think,” Swann continued, “that sound can reflect, like water, like a mirror. And it’s curious, too, that Vinteuil’s phrase now shows me only the things to which I paid no attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days, it recalls nothing, it has swapped things around.” “Charles, I don’t think that’s very polite to me, what you’re saying.” “Not polite? Really, you women are superb! I was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music shows—to me, at least—is not ‘the triumph of the Will’ or ‘In Tune with the Infinite,’ but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock-coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. Good God, it’s less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme de Cambremer.”

Mme Swann laughed. “That is a lady who’s supposed to have been very much in love with Charles,” she explained, in the same tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer of Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her informed, she had replied to me: “I ought to explain that Monsieur Swann was very much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn’t that so, Charles dear?” “You’re not to start saying things about Mme de Cambremer,” Swann checked her, secretly flattered. “But I’m only repeating what I’ve been told. Besides, it seems that she’s extremely clever; I don’t know her myself. I believe she’s very pushing, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she was quite mad about you; there’s nothing hurtful in that.” Swann remained silent as a deaf-mute, which was a sort of confirmation, and a proof of his self-complacency.

“Since what I’m playing reminds you of the Zoo,” his wife went on, with a playful pretence of being offended, “we might drive this boy there this afternoon if it would amuse him. The weather’s lovely now, and you can recapture your fond impressions! Which reminds me, talking of the Zoo, do you know, this young man thought that we were devotedly attached to a person whom I cut as a matter of fact whenever I possibly can, Mme Blatin. I think it’s rather humiliating for us that she should be taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr Cottard, who never says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she’s positively repellent.” “A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for her is that she’s exactly like Savonarola. She’s the very image of that portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo.”

This mania of Swann’s for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for even what we call individual expression is—as we so painfully discover when we are in love and would like to believe in the unique reality of the beloved