Swann's Way

in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of
life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find
a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his
perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had
admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give
those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness
to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far
succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he
felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious
and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and
repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had
retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine
satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the
abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern
original, whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be,
and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he, for some time