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That first day on which I met him with Gilberte’s parents, I mentioned to Bergotte that I had recently been to see Berma in Phèdre; and he told me that in the scene in which she stood with her arm raised to the level of her shoulders—one of those very scenes that had been greeted with such applause—she had managed to suggest with great nobility of art certain classical figures which quite possibly she had never even seen, a Hesperid carved in the same attitude upon a metope at Olympia, and also the beautiful primitive virgins on the Erechtheum.

“It may be sheer divination, and yet I fancy that she goes to museums. It would be interesting to ‘log’ that.” (“Log” was one of those regular Bergotte expressions, and one which various young men who had never met him had caught from him, speaking like him by some sort of telepathic suggestion.)

“Do you mean the Caryatids?” asked Swann.

“No, no,” said Bergotte, “except in the scene where she confesses her passion to Oenone, where she moves her hand exactly like Hegeso on the stele in the Ceramicus, it’s a far more primitive art that she evokes. I was referring to the Korai of the old Erechtheum, and I admit that there is perhaps nothing quite so remote from the art of Racine, but there are so many things already in Phèdre . . . that one more . . . Oh, and then, yes, she’s really charming, that little sixth-century Phaedra, the rigidity of the arm, the lock of hair ‘frozen into marble,’ yes, you know, it’s wonderful of her to have discovered all that. There is a great deal more antiquity in it than in most of the books they’re labelling ‘antique’ this year.”

Since Bergotte had in one of his books addressed a famous invocation to these archaic statues, the words that he was now uttering were quite intelligible to me, and gave me a fresh reason for taking an interest in Berma’s acting. I tried to picture her again in my mind, as she had looked in that scene in which I remembered that she had raised her arm to the level of her shoulder. And I said to myself: “There we have the Hesperid of Olympia; there we have the sister of those adorable suppliants on the Acropolis; there indeed is nobility in art!” But in order for these thoughts to enhance for me the beauty of Berma’s gesture, Bergotte would have had to put them into my head before the performance. Then, while that attitude of the actress actually existed in flesh and blood before my eyes, at that moment when the thing that is happening still has the plenitude of reality, I might have tried to extract from it the idea of archaic sculpture. But all that I retained of Berma in that scene was a memory which was no longer susceptible of modification; as meagre as an image devoid of those deep layers of the present in which one can delve and genuinely discover something new, an image on which one cannot retrospectively impose an interpretation that is not subject to verification and objective sanction.

At this point Mme Swann chipped into the conversation, asking me whether Gilberte had remembered to give me what Bergotte had written about Phèdre, and adding, “My daughter is such a scatterbrain!” Bergotte smiled modestly and protested that they were only a few pages of no importance. “But it’s absolutely delightful, that little booklet, that little ‘tract’ of yours,” Mme Swann assured him, to show that she was a good hostess, to give the impression that she had read Bergotte’s essay, and also because she liked not merely to flatter Bergotte, but to pick and choose from what he wrote, to influence him. And it must be admitted that she did inspire him, though not in the way that she supposed. But when all is said there are, between what constituted the elegance of Mme Swann’s drawing-room and a whole aspect of Bergotte’s work, connexions such that each of them may serve, among elderly men today, as a commentary upon the other.

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told