Page 63 - swanns-way

recognise as ‘common form’ in novels, seemed to me then
distinctive—for to me a new book was not one of a number of
similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched,
and with no cause of existence beyond himself—an intoxi-
cating whiff of the peculiar essence of François le Champi.
Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts
and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an into-
nation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange. The ‘action’
began: to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those
days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned the
pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the
gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story
more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who
was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And
so all the odd changes which take place in the relations be-
tween the miller’s wife and the boy, changes which only the
birth and growth of love can explain, seemed to me plunged
and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I could read-
ily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name
of Champi, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not
why, in its own bright colour, purpurate and charming. If
my mother was not a faithful reader, she was, none the less,
admirable when reading a work in which she found the note
of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her interpreta-
tion and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was
the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but
men and women whom she was moved to pity or admire:
it was touching to observe with what deference she would
banish from her voice, her gestures, from her whole con-

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