his language had in it something down-to-earth, something over-nourishing, which disappointed those who expected to hear him speak only of the “eternal torrent of forms” and of the “mysterious tremors of beauty.” Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon.) So when Bergotte—and his figures appear simple enough today—said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, trying to find his balance, and of Brichot that “for him even more than for Mme Swann the arrangement of his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because, in his twofold preoccupation with his profile and his reputation, he had always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at once of a lion and of a philosopher,” people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual. It was indeed to the writer whom I admired that the unrecognisable words issuing from the mask I had before my eyes must be attributed, and yet they could not have been inserted among his books like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, they were on another plane and required a transposition by means of which, one day, when I was repeating to myself certain phrases that I had heard Bergotte use, I discovered in them the whole framework of his written style, the different elements of which I was able to recognise and to name in this spoken discourse which had struck me as being so different.
From a more subsidiary point of view the special way, a little too meticulous, too intense, that he had of pronouncing certain words, certain adjectives which constantly recurred in his conversation and which he never uttered without a certain emphasis, giving to each of their syllables a separate force and intoning the last (as for instance the word visage which he always used in preference to figure and enriched with a number of superfluous v’s and s’s and g’s, which seemed all to explode from his outstretched palm at such moments), corresponded exactly to the fine passages where, in his prose, he brought out those favourite words, preceded by a sort of pause and composed in such a way in the metrical whole of the sentence that the reader was obliged, if he was not to make a false quantity, to give to each of them its full value. And yet one did not find in Bergotte’s speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed to ourselves. In this respect, there was more modulation, more stress in his books than in his talk: stress independent of beauty of style, which the author himself has possibly not perceived, since it is not separable from his