Page 50 - swanns-way

gle note, one thinks all the same that they are being played
somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so
that all the old subscribers, and my grandmother’s sisters
too, when Swann had given them his seats, used to strain
their ears as if they had caught the distant approach of an
army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner
of the Rue de Trévise.
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position
than which none could be counted upon to involve me in
graver consequences at my parents’ hands; consequences
far graver, indeed, than a stranger would have imagined,
and such as (he would have thought) could follow only some
really shameful fault. But in the system of education which
they had given me faults were not classified in the same or-
der as in that of other children, and I had been taught to
place at the head of the list (doubtless because there was no
other class of faults from which I needed to be more care-
fully protected) those in which I can now distinguish the
common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to
a nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never
been uttered in my hearing; no one had yet accounted for
my temptations in a way which might have led me to believe
that there was some excuse for my giving in to them, or that
I was actually incapable of holding out against them. Yet
I could easily recognise this class of transgressions by the
anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour
of the punishment which followed them; and I knew that
what I had just done was in the same category as certain
other sins for which I had been severely chastised, though

50 Swann’s Way