Page 373 - swanns-way

this costume in which he had never seen her; he registered a
vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going
at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless
life—a life almost nonexistent, since she was then invisible
to him—of his mistress, there had been but a single inci-
dent apart from all those smiles directed towards himself;
namely, her walking abroad beneath a Rembrandt hat, with
a bunch of violets in her bosom.
Except when he asked her for Vinteuil’s little phrase
instead of the Valse des Roses, Swann made no effort to in-
duce her to play the things that he himself preferred, nor, in
literature any more than in music, to correct the manifold
errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was not intel-
ligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell
her about the great poets, she had imagined that she would
suddenly get to know whole pages of romantic and heroic
verse, in the style of the Vicomte de Borelli, only even more
moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he had
been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman that
had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one
knew, she had lost all interest in that painter. She would of-
ten say: ‘I’m sure, poetry; well, of course, there’d be nothing
like it if it was all true, if the poets really believed the things
they said. But as often as not you’ll find there’s no one so
mean and calculating as those fellows. I know something
about poetry. I had a friend, once, who was in love with a
poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but
love, and heaven, and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken
in! He had more than three hundred thousand francs out

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