! And yet we poor women," she went on, "are
forbidden pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in
the world as soft as these. None. When M. Verdurin did me the honour
of being madly jealous... come, you might at least be polite. Don't say
that you never have been jealous!"

"But, my dear, I have said absolutely nothing. Look here, Doctor, I call
you as a witness; did I utter a word?"

Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not
like to stop.

"Come along; you can caress them later; now it is you that are going to
be caressed, caressed in the ear; you'll like that, I think. Here's the
young gentleman who will take charge of that."

After the pianist had played, Swann felt and shewed more interest in him
than in any of the other guests, for the following reason:

The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music
played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the
material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it
had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the
violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole,
he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a
flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent,
level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of
the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at
a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline,
or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had
tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony--he
knew not which--that had just been played, and had opened and expanded
his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist
air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils. Perhaps it was
owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so
confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only
purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original,
and irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order,
vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression _sine materia_.
Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out
before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their
pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation
of breath or te