V - The Guermantes Way, Part 2, Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
Context: The Narrator's grandmother dies, her face in death reverting to its youthful appearance. At the Guermantes' dinner party, the Narrator admires and reflects upon their Elstir paintings, then meets the cream of society, including the Princess de Parme, "an amiable simpleton". He learns more about the Guermantes, in particular their hereditary features, and he muses upon aristocratic lineages. Later on, Swann arrives. Now a committed Dreyfusard, he is terminally ill.
3-4 When death calls We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connection with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death - or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again - may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month's time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane, shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes' time, more or less, at the moment when the carriage has reached the Champs-Elysee. Perhaps those who are haunted as a rule by the fear of the utter strangeness of death will find something reassuring in this kind of death - in this kind of first contact with death - because death thus assumes a known, familiar guise of everyday life. A good luncheon has preceded it, and the same outing that people take who are in perfect health. A drive home in an open carriage comes on top of its first onslaught...
17-18 Doctors.. We took the advice of a relative who assured us that if we sent for the specialist X he would get rid of that in a couple of days. People say that sort of thing about their own doctors, and their friends believe them just as Françoise always believed the advertisements in the newspapers. The specialist came with bag packed with all the colds and coughs of his other patients, like Aeolus's bottle. . .. According to him.. everything, whether headache or colic, heart-disease or diabetes, was a disease of the nose that had been wrongly diagnosed. 19-20 Bergotte, also very ill, pays a visit. The fame of writers The body of his work.. had now grown in stature and strength before the eyes of all, had acquired an extraordinary power of expansion among the general public. The general rule is, no doubt, that only after his death does a writer become famous. But it was while he still lived, and during his slow progress towards a death that he had not yet reached that this writer was able to watch the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name is stopped short by the stone upon his grave. In the deafness of the eternal sleep, he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult. He was moving still, though without difficulty, while his books, bounding about him, like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youthfulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after day, to his very bedside, a crowd of fresh admirers. 21-22 The artist's (painter's) fame There was a time at which people recognised things quite easily in pictures when it was Fromentin who had painted them, and could not recognise them at all when it was Renoir. People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, well into the present century, before Renoir was hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to us. When it is at an end, the operator says to us: " Now look! And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from what they used to be, because they are Renoirs, those Renoir types which we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which reminds us of that other which, when we first saw it, looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable shades but lacking precisely the shades proper to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent. |
22-23 The distinction between art and science The Narrator tires of Bergotte and is attracted by a new writer. I reflected that it was not so many years since a similar reconstruction of the world, like that which I was waiting now for his successor to produce, had been wrought for me by Bergotte himself. Until I was led to ask myself whether there was indeed any truth in the distinction which we are always making between art which is no more advanced now than in Homer's day, and science with its continuous progress. Perhaps, on the contrary, art was in this respect like science; each new writer seemed to me to have advanced beyond the stage of his immediate predecessor; and how was I to know that in 20 years time, when I should be able to accompany without strain or effort the newcomer of today, another might not appear at whose approach he in turn would be packed off to limbo to which his own coming would have consign
33 A few days later, when I was in bed and sleeping, my mother came to call me in the early hours of morning. With that tender consolation which, in great crises, people who are crushed by grief show even for the slightest discomfort of others (his grandmother is in extremis). "Forgive me for disturbing your sleep," she said to me. "I was not asleep," I answered as I awoke. I said this in good faith...... 34 Awakening from sleep (and continuing from the above) .... The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us to the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, over which we were drifting still a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when shines that bright star which at the moment of waking illuminates behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that this was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star, it must be added, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the false existence but the very appearance of our dream, and merely enables him who has awoken to say to himself: "I was asleep." 35 .. deathbeds, at time, have an air of being social occasions.. 48 The death of his grandmother; she is returned to youth An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses which had only begun to turn grey and hitherto had seemed not so old as my grandmother herself. But now on the contrary it was they alone that set the crown of age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the long course of years had been carved on it by suffering. As at the far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother's lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the middle ages, had laid her in the form of a young maiden. |
49 A change in the weather
I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold mist which had not cleared until nearly midday. A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew... Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a self-centred man, longing for the chimney comer and the nuptial couch, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this different world
51 The grey light, falling like a fine rain on the earth, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday holiday-makers appeared in a silvery sheen. (56) Weary, resigned, busy for several hours still over its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade.
58 A collector of women
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. Only the example of other collectors should be a warning only but to us to make changes, to have not one woman but several. Those charming suggestions in which a girl abounds of a sea-beach, of the braided hair of a statue in church, of an old print, of everything that makes one see and admire in her, whenever she appears, a charming composition, those suggestions are not very stable. Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her; though I must add that these two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. ..here I need only state my regret that 1 did not have the sense simply to have kept my collection of women as people keep their collections of old quizzing glasses, never so complete, in their cabinet, that there is not always room for another and rarer still. (73) Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to all of her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that it was possible for me, on the girl's 2 cheeks. to kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.
75 Humans are missing the where-with-all to kiss with
The place of this absent organ he supplies with his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips.. must be content.. with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek. (76)..To begin with, as my mouth began gradually to approach the cheeks which my eyes had suggested to me that it should kiss, my eyes, changing their position, saw a different pair of cheeks; the throat, studied at closer range and as though through a magnifying glass shewed in its coarse grain a robustness which modified the character of the face. (I)n this brief passage of my lips towards her cheek it was 10 Albertines that I saw; this single girl being like a goddess with several heads, that which I had last seen, if I tried to approach it, gave place to another. .. But alas.. suddenly my eyes ceased to see; next, my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any fragrance, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these unpleasant signs, that I was at last in the act of kissing Albertine's cheek.
86-87 Domestic violence
What troubled me now was the discovery that almost every home sheltered some unhappy person. In one, the wife was always in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her. In the next it was the other way around. In another a hardworking mother, beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was endeavouring to conceal her sufferings from her neighbours. Quite half the human race was in tears.
93 The family
Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in a perpetual upward movement, the family still plays an important part in certain stationary grades, such as the lower middle class and the semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing higher.
108 An appointment at the corner, Boulevarde des Capuchins/Rue du Bac.
When thinking of the person we are going to see there, we remind ourselves that the names were once those of, respectively, the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood on the site and the ferry across the Seine.
A submarine grotto and tears like penetrating rain
111 We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense mass of trees which, like shells, were trampled into the soil, and poked my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.
118 a distinct lowering of temperature is brought about by a certain kind of tears which fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating rain.
I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold mist which had not cleared until nearly midday. A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew... Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a self-centred man, longing for the chimney comer and the nuptial couch, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this different world
51 The grey light, falling like a fine rain on the earth, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday holiday-makers appeared in a silvery sheen. (56) Weary, resigned, busy for several hours still over its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade.
58 A collector of women
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. Only the example of other collectors should be a warning only but to us to make changes, to have not one woman but several. Those charming suggestions in which a girl abounds of a sea-beach, of the braided hair of a statue in church, of an old print, of everything that makes one see and admire in her, whenever she appears, a charming composition, those suggestions are not very stable. Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her; though I must add that these two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. ..here I need only state my regret that 1 did not have the sense simply to have kept my collection of women as people keep their collections of old quizzing glasses, never so complete, in their cabinet, that there is not always room for another and rarer still. (73) Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to all of her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that it was possible for me, on the girl's 2 cheeks. to kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.
75 Humans are missing the where-with-all to kiss with
The place of this absent organ he supplies with his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips.. must be content.. with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek. (76)..To begin with, as my mouth began gradually to approach the cheeks which my eyes had suggested to me that it should kiss, my eyes, changing their position, saw a different pair of cheeks; the throat, studied at closer range and as though through a magnifying glass shewed in its coarse grain a robustness which modified the character of the face. (I)n this brief passage of my lips towards her cheek it was 10 Albertines that I saw; this single girl being like a goddess with several heads, that which I had last seen, if I tried to approach it, gave place to another. .. But alas.. suddenly my eyes ceased to see; next, my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any fragrance, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these unpleasant signs, that I was at last in the act of kissing Albertine's cheek.
86-87 Domestic violence
What troubled me now was the discovery that almost every home sheltered some unhappy person. In one, the wife was always in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her. In the next it was the other way around. In another a hardworking mother, beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was endeavouring to conceal her sufferings from her neighbours. Quite half the human race was in tears.
93 The family
Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in a perpetual upward movement, the family still plays an important part in certain stationary grades, such as the lower middle class and the semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing higher.
108 An appointment at the corner, Boulevarde des Capuchins/Rue du Bac.
When thinking of the person we are going to see there, we remind ourselves that the names were once those of, respectively, the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood on the site and the ferry across the Seine.
A submarine grotto and tears like penetrating rain
111 We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense mass of trees which, like shells, were trampled into the soil, and poked my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.
118 a distinct lowering of temperature is brought about by a certain kind of tears which fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating rain.
123 Lost time It is because we live over our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory that fastens upon the coolness or sun-parched heat of some morning or afternoon, receives the shadow of some solitary place, is enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost, remote form all others, because, therefore, the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one to another, wholly different time) are of necessity eliminated, that, if we revive another memory taken from another year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of 2 divers qualities, that of the air we breathe and the colour of the scene between our eyes?
124 Ideas The ideas that had appeared before me took flight. Ideas are goddesses who deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a turning point in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when they, standing framed in the doorway, bring him the annunciation of their tidings. But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. 127 The little group which met to try to perpetuate, to explore the fugitive emotions aroused by the Zola trial attached a similar importance to this particular cafe. But they were not viewed with favour by the young nobles who composed the rest of its patrons and had taken possession of a second room, separated from the other only by a flimsy parapet topped with a row of plants. These looked upon Dreyfus and his supporters as traitors,aIbeit 25 years later, ideas having had time to classify themselves and the Dreyfusism to acquire, in the light of history, a certain distinction, the sons, dance-mad Bolshevists, of these same young nobles were to declare to the "intellectuals" who questioned them that undoubtedly, had they been alive at the time, they would have stood up for D, without having any clearer idea of what the great Case had been about than... For on the night of the fog the noblemen of the cafe, who were in due course to become the fathers of these young intellectuals, Dreyfusards in retrospect, were still bachelors. 135 In politics the proprietor of this particular cafe had for some time now concentrated his pupil-teacher’s mind on certain details of the Dreyfus case. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the conversation of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere. 147 Atheism An artist has no need to express the quality of his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. 151-2 The past This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the minds of mediocre mystifiers.. The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present. It is not within a few months only after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effectively influence its course, it is not within 15 months only after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still find the vital evidence which will throw a light upon it; after hundreds and thousands of years the scholar who has been studying in a distant land the place-names, the customs of the inhabitants, may still extract from them some legend long anterior to the Christian era.. which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, dwells surrounded by the present, like an emanation of greater density, immemorial and stable. |
153-6 Impressionism Among these pictures several of the kind that seemed most absurd to ordinary people interested me more than the rest because they recreated those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not make some process of reasoning intervene. How often, when driving in the dark, do we not come upon a long, lighted street which begins a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is nothing but a rectangular patch of wall with a bright light falling on it, which has given us the mirage of depth. In view of which is it not logical, not by any artifice of symbolism but by a sincere return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of that first illusion, we mistook it? Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognised them.. His (Elstir) effort has often been to break up that aggregate of impressions which we call vision
155-6 There was something enchanting about this waterside carnival. The river, the women’s dresses, the sails of the boats, the innumerable reflections of one thing and another came crowding into this little square panel of beauty which Elstir had cut out of a marvelous afternoon. What delighted one in the dress of a woman who had stopped for a moment in the dance because it was hot and she was out of breath was irresistible also in the same way in the canvas of a motionless sail, in the water of the little harbour, in the wooden bridge, in the leaves of the tree and in the sky. “Tasteless hospital, slightly vulgar lady.. her dress is receiving the same light as the sail of the boat, and there are no degrees of value and beauty; the commonplace dress and the sail, beautiful in itself, are 2 mirrors reflecting the same glam: the value in all in the painter’s eye”. This eye had had the skill to arrest for all time the motion of the hours at this luminous instant, when the lady had felt hot and had stopped dancing, when the tree was fringed with a belt of yellow, when the sails seemed to be slipping over a golden glaze. But.. this so permanent canvas gave one the most fleeting impression, one felt that the lady would presently move out of it, the boats drift away, the night draw on, that pleasure comes to an end, that life passes and that the moments illuminated by the convergence, at once, of so many light do not recur. 175 But just as a public official or a priest sees his own humble talents multiplied to infinity (as a wave is by the whole mass of the sea which presses behind it) by those forces on which they can rely, the Govt of France and the Catholic Church, so Mme de Guermantes was borne on by that other force, aristocratic courtesy in its truest form. 189 Signing off on a letter "Monsieur" and "Croyez monsieur a mes sentiments distingues" – cold opening and frigid conclusion. 190 Thus it was that we saw Saint-Loup's handclasp thrust out as though involuntarily at the moment of hearing one's name, without any participation by his eyes, without the addition of a bow. 191 Whereas a Saint-Loup who was up to his eyes in debt dazzled Doncières with his carriage-horses, a Courvoisier who was extremely rich always went in the tram. Society becomes more hierarchical as it becomes more democratic 203 Lastly, would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic. This seems highly probable. The political power of the Popes has grown enormously since they ceased to possess either States or an Army; our cathedrals meant far less to a devout Catholic of the 17th century than they mean to an atheist of the 20th, and if the Princesse de Parme had been the sovereign ruler of a State, no doubt I should have felt myself impelled to speak of her almost as I should speak of a President of the Republic, that is to say not at all. Professors in their gowns and red caps still rooted in rigidly pharasaical ideas 208 The mediaeval gown and red cap which are still donned by the electoral colleges of the Faculties are (or were at least, not so long since) something more than a purely outward survival from a narrow-minded past, from a rigid sectarianism. Under the cap with its golden tassels, like the High Priest in the conical mitre of the Jews, the 'Professors' were still, in the years that preceded the Dreyfus case, fast rooted in rigorously pharisaical ideas. |
228 A cry heard in the Chamber of Deputies: "It's most serious".
We know that when a Minister explains to the Chamber that he believed himself to be acting rightly in following a line of conduct which does, as a matter of fact, appear quite straightforward to the commonsense person who next morning in his newspaper reads the report of the sitting, this commonsense reader does nevertheless feel himself suddenly stirred and begins to doubt whether he has been right in approving the Minister's conduct when he sees that the latter's speech was listened to with the accompaniment of a lively agitation and punctuated with expressions of condemnation such
as: "It's most serious!" ejaculated by a Deputy whose name and titles are so long, and followed in the report by movements so emphatic that in the whole interruption the words "It's most serious!" occupy less room than a hemistich does in an alexandrine. For instance in the days when M. de Guermantes, Prince des Laumes, sat in the Chamber, one used to read now and then in the Paris newspapers, albeit it was intended primarily for the Méséglise division, to shew the electors there that they had not given their votes to an inactive or voiceless mandatory:
(Monsieur de Guermantes-Bouillon, Prince des
Laumes: "This is serious!" "Hear, hear!" from the
Centre and some of the Right benches, loud
exclamations from the Extreme Left.)
Immersed and comfortable in his anti-Dreyfusism, the General adopts a silent and expressionless pose
259 The name of Zola did not stir a muscle on the face of M de Beautreillis. The General's ant-Dreyfusism was too deep-rooted for him to seek to give expression to it. And his good-natured silence when anyone broached these topics moved the profane heart as a proof of the same delicacy that a priest shows in avoiding reference to your religious duties.
But some are not so shy
261-2 "But Zola is not a realist, Ma'am, he's a poet!" said Mme de Guermantes. The Princesse de Parme: "Zola a poet!" Yes:" Your Highness must have remarked how he magnifies everything he touches.. He is the epic dungheap. He is the Homer of the sewers! .."
320 Family origins rear their ugly head But so long as a great name is not extinct it keeps in the full light of day those men and women who bear it; and there can be no doubt that, to a certain extent, the interest which the illustriousness of these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact that one can, starting from today, follow their ascending course, step by step, to a point far beyond the 14th century, recover the diaries and correspondence of all the forbears of M de Charlus, in a past in which an impenetrable night would cloak the origins of a middle-class family, and in which we make out, in the luminous backward projection of a name, the origin and persistence of certain nervous characteristics, certain vices the disorders of one or other Guermantes.
331 ..(T)he discoveries we make in the library of a country house, out of date, incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, lacking in almost everything we value, but offering us now and then some curious scrap of information, for instance the quotation of a fine passage.. Great noblemen are almost the only people from whom one learns as much as one does from peasants;
Before the hawthorns and the madeleine
333 The stories and conversations I had heard at Mme de Guermantes' dinner table differed from what I had been able to feel before the hawthorns, or when I tasted a crumb of madeleine. They remained alien to me. Entering for a moment into me, who was only physically possessed by them, one would have said being of a social, not an individual nature, they were impatient to escape.
371 Hereditary illnesses read like a horoscope Swann's illness was the same that had killed his mother, who had been attacked by it at precisely the age which he had now reached. Our existences are in truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if there really were sorcerers in the world. And just as there is a certain duration of life for humanity in general, so there is one for families in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for the members of it who resemble one another.
Swann's blindspot: if you are anti Dreyfus, you must be antisemitic!
374-5 I asked him how it was that all the Guermantes's were anti-Dreyfusards. "In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-semites", replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them not, but like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reason which might permit of discussion. "But the Duc de Guermantes is not anti-semitic?” "You can see quite well that he is, since he’s an anti-Dreyfusard," replied Swann, without noticing the logical fallacy. Dreyfusism had brought to Swann an extraordinary simplicity of mind, and had imparted to his way of looking at things an impulsiveness, an inconsistency.