Swann's Way

which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have
recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine,
some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the
sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and
as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it
enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one
ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate
good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would
continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt
they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded
vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their
equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's
heart.

It was along the 'Méséglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that
M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her
dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never
saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than