been so unjustly
decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them
of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine
resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Dr. Percepied, whose loud
voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the
part of 'double-dealer,' a part to which he was not, otherwise, adapted,
without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite
unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make
the Cure and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh
voice: "What d'ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with
her friend, Mile. Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? Oh, I know
nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about
it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that
girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vocation of a
child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too,
with his daughter's friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular
musical box, that house out there! What are you laughing at? I say
they've been playing too much music, those people. I met Papa Vinteuil
the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his
feet."

Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about this time,
avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught
sight of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a
sea of sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting
his daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave,
could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a
broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to
the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed,
what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid
his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of
circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which
he himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first
recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his
presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer; the odd words, the
unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must
have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to ha