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grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere
in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that
engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy
them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction
and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of
miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without
interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it
lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of
its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter
and himself from the point of view of the world, and of their
reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side
in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation
of their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to
utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the
terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him
and his daughter would have employed; he saw himself and
her in ‘low,’ in the very ‘lowest water,’ inextricably stranded;
and his manners had of late been tinged with that humil-
ity, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to
whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they
might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some
means of rising again to their level, which is an almost me-
chanical result of any human misfortune.
One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of
the streets of Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of anoth-
er street, found himself so suddenly face to face with us all
that he had not time to escape; and Swann, with that almost
arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dis-
solution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another’s

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