Swann's Way

retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value
in themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such
great value to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he
sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even
written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
unknown for ever; my mother thought, also, of that other and still more
cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing
the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future; when
she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness,
which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having
virtually killed her father. "Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say,
"he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting
his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only
come to him from her."

At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece,