Page 228 - swanns-way

Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about
this time, avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away
as soon as he caught sight of them, changed in a few months
into an old man, engulfed in a sea of sorrows, incapable of
any effort not directly aimed at promoting his daughter’s
happiness, spending whole days beside his wife’s grave,
could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dy-
ing of a broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he
paid no attention to the rumours which were going about.
He knew, perhaps he even believed, what his neighbours
were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid his
virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity
of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice
which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning,
without at first recognising it beneath the disguise which it
assumes on entering his presence, so as to wound him and
to make him suffer; the odd words, the unaccountable at-
titude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil’s sensibility
it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man
of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situ-
ations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian
circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to
establish itself in the security necessary to its development a
vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child,
perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father
and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes.
And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his
daughter’s conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her

228 Swann’s Way