Page 142 - swanns-way

said on unimpeachable authority that my great-aunt her-
self had led a ‘gay’ life in her younger days, and had been
notoriously ‘kept.’ I could not refrain from passing on so
important a piece of information to my parents; the next
time Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards,
when I met him in the street, he greeted me with extreme
coldness.
But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.
For the first few days, like a tune which will be run-
ning in one’s head and maddening one soon enough, but
of which one has not for the moment ‘got hold,’ the things
I was to love so passionately in Bergotte’s style had not yet
caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of
his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interest-
ed in the story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we
go every day to meet a woman at some party or entertain-
ment by the charm of which we imagine it is that we are
attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic phrases
which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden
flow of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the
work itself would animate and elevate his style; and it was
at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of
the ‘vain dream of life,’ of the ‘inexhaustible torrent of fair
forms,’ of the ‘sterile, splendid torture of understanding and
loving,’ of the ‘moving effigies which ennoble for all time the
charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals”; that he
would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by
the use of marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I
would naturally have ascribed that sound of harping which

142 Swann’s Way