Page 143 - swanns-way

began to chime and echo in my ears, an accompaniment to
which that imagery added something ethereal and sublime.
One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which
I had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which
the meagre joy I had tasted in the first passage bore no com-
parison, a joy which I felt myself to have experienced in
some innermost chamber of my soul, deep, undivided, vast,
from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to have
been swept away. For what had happened was that, while
I recognised in this passage the same taste for uncommon
phrases, the same bursts of music, the same idealist philos-
ophy which had been present in the earlier passages without
my having taken them into account as the source of my
pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being con-
fronted by a particular passage in one of Bergotte’s works,
which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon
the surface of my mind, but rather of the ‘ideal passage’ of
Bergotte, common to every one of his books, and to which
all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it,
had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own
understanding seemed to be enlarged.
I was by no means Bergotte’s sole admirer; he was the
favourite writer also of a friend of my mother’s, a highly lit-
erary lady; while Dr. du, Boulbon had kept all his patients
waiting until he finished Bergotte’s latest volume; and it
was from his consulting room, and from a house in a park
near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered
of that taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but
now so universally acclimatised that one finds it flowering

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