Page 541 - swanns-way

of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew
that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase it-
self, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for
his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which
he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at
that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard the
sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsi-
fied still further the perspective in which he saw the music,
that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave
of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost
all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separat-
ed by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few
among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion,
of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing
from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have
been discovered by certain great artists who do us the ser-
vice, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to
the theme which they have found, of shewing us what rich-
ness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great
black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our
soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and
waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians.
In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind’s eye a
clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so
consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so
original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved
the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds.
Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and hap-
piness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it

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