exact 'finish' that the
impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their
'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well
performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does
not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being
played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all
the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had
given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught
the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded
the corner of the Rue de Trevise.

I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which
none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my
parents' hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would
have imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only
some really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they
had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of
other children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which
I needed to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now
distinguish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to
a nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never been uttered
in my hearing; no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way
which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my
giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out
against them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of transgressions
by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of the
punishment which followed them; and I knew that what I had just done was
in the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely
chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to
meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I
had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage,
I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be
packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window,
I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road
which led to the rea