as they
came. Marvellous bird! The violinist seemed to wish to charm, to tame,
to woo, to win it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the
little phrase which it evoked shook like a medium's the body of the
violinist, 'possessed' indeed. Swann knew that the phrase was going to
speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that
the strain of waiting for the imminent moment when he would find himself
face to face, once more, with the phrase, convulsed him in one of those
sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring
from us, not when we are alone, but when we repeat one or the other to
a friend, in whom we see ourselves reflected, like a third person, whose
probable emotion softens him. It reappeared, but this time to remain
poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though
immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the
precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an
iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow, when
its brightness fades, seems to subside, then soars again and, before it
is extinguished, is glorified with greater splendour than it has ever
shewn; so to the two colours which the phrase had hitherto allowed to
appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and
made them sing. Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all
the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest
movement might embarrass the magic presence, supernatural, delicious,
frail, that would so easily vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed
of speaking. The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent,
perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive),
breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to
arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on
which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on
which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. It followed that, when
the phrase at last was finished, and only its fragmentary echoes floated
among the subsequent themes which had already taken its place, if Swann
at first was annoyed to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed for her
imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide in him her impressions,
before even the sonata had come to an end; he could not refrain from
smiling, and perhaps also found an underlying sense, which she was