r forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture
of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for
all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he
would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of
marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have
ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears,
an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and
sublime. One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I
had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy
I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt
myself to have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep,
undivided, vast, from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to
have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised
in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts
of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the
earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source
of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted
by a particular passage in one of Bergotte's works, which traced a
purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but
rather of the 'ideal passage' of Bergotte, common to every one of his
books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming
merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own
understanding seemed to be enlarged.

I was by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary lady; while Dr. du,
Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting until he finished Bergotte's
latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house in
a park near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered of that
taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but now so universally
acclimatised that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe
and America, and even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its
refinement, but in that alone. What my mother's friend, and, it would
seem, what Dr. du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte
was just what I liked, the same flow of melody, the same old-fashioned
phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by
him, in such prominence, as to hint at a particu