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By Root 1220 0

in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. But when M. Vinteuil thought of his daughter and himself from the point of view of society, from the point of view of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the same terms as the most hostile inhabitant of Combray; he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up (however far beneath him they might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human downfall.

One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so suddenly face to face with us all that he had no time to escape; and Swann, with that condescending charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another’s shame merely a reason for treating him with a benevolence the expression of which serves to gratify all the more the self-esteem of the bestower because he feels that it is all the more precious to the recipient, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil, with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over one day to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier, would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swann’s friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of preserving it.

“What a charming man!” he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the middle classes fall victims to the charms of a duchess, however ugly and stupid. “What a charming man! What a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!”

And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most sincere people, who lay aside the opinion they actually hold of a person while they are talking to him and express it as soon as he is no longer there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann’s marriage, invoking principles and conventions which (for the very reason that they were invoking them in common with him, as though they were all decent people of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For whenever he met M. Vinteuil, he would remember afterwards that he had been meaning for a long time to ask him about someone of the same name, a relation of his, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he had made up his mind not to forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.

Since the Méséglise way was the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Méséglise was somewhat wet, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussainville wood beneath whose dense thatch of leaves we could take shelter.

Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness