Page 226 - swanns-way

to more subtle harmonies—from those in which the moon
seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have rec-
ognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by
Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out
sharply against the sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some
work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were, at that
date, my own impressions, and which it enraged my grand-
mother’s sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought
to set before children, and that children shewed their own
innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures
as they would continue to admire when their minds were
developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic
values as material objects which an unclouded vision could
not fail to discern, without needing to have their equivalent
in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one’s
heart.
It was along the ‘Méséglise way,’ at Montjouvain, a house
built on the edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep,
shrub-grown hill, that M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used
often to meet his daughter driving her dogcart at full speed
along the road. After a certain year we never saw her alone,
but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than her-
self, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in
the end installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjou-
vain. People said: ‘That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded
by love not to see what everyone is talking about, and to
let his daughter—a man who is horrified if you use a word
in the wrong sense—bring a woman like that to live under
his roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a

226 Swann’s Way