Page 146 - swanns-way

of my sentences in Bergotte’s. But it was only then, when
I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it
was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they
should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have detected in
my mind, and in my fear of their not turning out ‘true to
life,’ I had no time to ask myself whether what I was writing
would be pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of
language, no kind of ideas which I really liked, except these.
My feverish and unsatisfactory attempts were themselves a
token of my love, a love which brought me no pleasure, but
was, for all that, intense and deep. And so, when I came
suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another,
that is to say stripped of their familiar accompaniment of
scruples and repressions and self-tormentings, I was free to
indulge to the full my own appetite for such things, just as a
cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to prepare for oth-
er people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some
joke about an old family servant, to which his solemn and
magnificent style added a great deal of irony, but which was
in principle what I had often said to my grandmother about
Françoise, and when, another time, I had discovered that he
thought not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors
of absolute Truth which were his writings, a remark similar
to one which I had had occasion to make on our friend M.
Legrandin (and, moreover, my remarks on Françoise and
M. Legrandin were among those which I would most reso-
lutely have sacrificed for Bergotte’s sake, in the belief that
he would find them quite without interest); then it was sud-

146 Swann’s Way