Page 112 - swanns-way

tors, whose art, although as yet I had no experience of it,
was the first of all its numberless forms in which Art itself
allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor’s
tricks of intonation and inflection and another’s, the most
trifling differences would strike me as being of an incalcu-
lable importance. And from what I had been told of them
I would arrange them in the order of their talent in lists
which I used to murmur to myself all day long: lists which
in the end became petrified in my brain and were a source
of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in
class, when the master’s head was turned, to communicate
with some new friend, I would always begin by asking him
whether he had begun yet to go to theatres, and if he agreed
that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came
below Thiron, or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden
volatility which the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony
rigidity, would engender in my mind, in which it moved up-
wards to the second place, the rich vitality with which the
name of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable
it to slip down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my
brain with a sense of bradding and blossoming life.
But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if
the sight of Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the
Théâtre-Français, had plunged me in the throes and suffer-
ings of hopeless love, how much more did the name of a
‘star,’ blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more,
seen through the window of a brougham which passed me

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