him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. “Ah! the designer will be glad to hear that; he’s a real artist, and I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I don’t care for it much, it bathes everything in a sort of sea-green glow, little Phèdre standing there looks too like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. You will tell me, of course, that it brings out the cosmic aspect of the play. That’s quite true. All the same, it would be more appropriate if the scene were laid in the Court of Neptune. Oh yes, I know the Vengeance of Neptune does come into the play. I don’t suggest for a moment that we should think only of Port-Royal, but after all Racine isn’t telling us a story about love among the sea-urchins. Still, it’s what my friend wanted, and it’s very well done, right or wrong, and really quite pretty. Yes, so you liked it, did you; you understood what he was after. We feel the same about it, don’t we, really: it’s a bit crazy, what he’s done, you agree with me, but on the whole it’s very clever.” And when Bergotte’s opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were less valid than the Ambassador’s; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality.
Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him that they had been treated with contempt by M. de Norpois. “But he’s an old goose!” was the answer. “He keeps on pecking at you because he imagines all the time that you’re a piece of cake, or a slice of cuttle-fish.” “What, you know Norpois?” asked Swann. “He’s as dull as a wet Sunday,” interrupted his wife, who had great faith in Bergotte’s judgment, and was no doubt afraid that M. de Norpois might have spoken ill of her to us. “I tried to make him talk after dinner; I don’t know if it’s his age or his digestion, but I found him too sticky for words. I really thought I should have to ‘dope’ him.” “Yes, isn’t he?” Bergotte chimed in. “You see, he has to keep his mouth shut half the time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that keep his shirt-front starched and his waistcoat white.”
“I think that Bergotte and my wife are both very hard on him,” came from Swann, who took the “line,” in his own house, of being a plain, sensible man. “I quite see that Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point of view,” (for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of “real life”) “he is quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a ‘lover.’ When he was Counsellor in Rome,” he went on, after making sure that Gilberte could not hear him, “he had a mistress here in Paris with whom he was madly in love, and he found time to make the double journey twice a week to see her for a couple of hours. She was, as it happens, a most intelligent woman, and remarkably beautiful then; she’s a dowager now. And he has had any number of others since. I’m sure I should have gone stark mad if the woman I was in love with lived in Paris and I had to be in Rome. Highly strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, ‘beneath’ them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal.”
As he spoke, Swann realised that I