that a page of Bergotte
would express precisely those ideas which I used often at night, when
I was unable to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so
concisely and well that his page had the appearance of a collection of
mottoes for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later
years, when I began to compose a book of my own, and the quality of some
of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to
go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent of my sentences
in Bergotte's. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages,
that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in
my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have
detected in my mind, and in my fear of their not turning out 'true to
life,' I had no time to ask myself whether what I was writing would be
pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of language, no kind of
ideas which I really liked, except these. My feverish and unsatisfactory
attempts were themselves a token of my love, a love which brought me no
pleasure, but was, for all that, intense and deep. And so, when I came
suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say
stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and
self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite
for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to
prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about
an old family servant, to which his solemn and magnificent style added a
great deal of irony, but which was in principle what I had often said to
my grandmother about Francoise, and when, another time, I had discovered
that he thought not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors of
absolute Truth which were his writings, a remark similar to one which I
had had occasion to make on our friend M. Legrandin (and, moreover, my
remarks on Francoise and M. Legrandin were among those which I would
most resolutely have sacrificed for Bergotte's sake, in the belief
that he would find them quite without interest); then it was suddenly
revealed to me that my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were
less widely separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they
were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I wept
upon his printed page, as in