ideas, of another world, of
another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by
the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one from
another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance. When,
after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little
phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his
confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress,
it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the
closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and
to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression
of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he
was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon
certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the
mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the
Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard
the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still
further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field
open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an
immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which,
here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored
tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of
passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing
from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been
discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they
awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have
found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to
us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration,
of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and
waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little
phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there
was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which
the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once
heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of
their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and
happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was
peculiar as he would know of the _Princesse de Cleves_, or of _Rene_,
should either