care about peering at things through
a microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference; no; we
don't waste time splitting hairs in this house; why not? well, it's not
a habit of ours, that's all," Mme. Verdurin replied, while Dr. Cottard
gazed at her with open-mouthed admiration, and yearned to be able to
follow her as she skipped lightly from one stepping-stone to another
of her stock of ready-made phrases. Both he, however, and Mme. Cottard,
with a kind of common sense which is shared by many people of humble
origin, would always take care not to express an opinion, or to pretend
to admire a piece of music which they would confess to each other, once
they were safely at home, that they no more understood than they could
understand the art of 'Master' Biche. Inasmuch as the public cannot
recognise the charm, the beauty, even the outlines of nature save in the
stereotyped impressions of an art which they have gradually assimilated,
while an original artist starts by rejecting those impressions, so
M. and Mme. Cottard, typical, in this respect, of the public, were
incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil's sonata or in Biche's
portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in
painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as
though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which
bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were
accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours haphazard upon
his canvas. When, on one of these, they were able to distinguish a human
form, they always found it coarsened and vulgarised (that is to say
lacking all the elegance of the school of painting through whose
spectacles they themselves were in the habit of seeing the people--real,
living people, who passed them in the streets) and devoid of truth, as
though M. Biche had not known how the human shoulder was constructed, or
that a woman's hair was not, ordinarily, purple.

And yet, when the 'faithful' were scattered out of earshot, the Doctor
felt that the opportunity was too good to be missed, and so (while Mme.
Verdurin was adding a final word of commendation of Vinteuil's sonata)
like a would-be swimmer who jumps into the water, so as to learn, but
chooses a moment when there are not too many people looking on:
"Yes, indeed; he's what they call a musician _di primo cartello_!" he
exclaimed, with a sudden determination.

Swann discovered no