Swann's Way

seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I
could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of
_Champi_, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own
bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my mother was not a faithful
reader, she was, none the less, admirable when reading a work in which
she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her
interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was
the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but men and
women whom she was moved to pity or admire: it was touching to observe
with what deference she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from
her whole conversation, now the note of joy which might have distressed
some mother who had long ago lost a child, now the recollection of an
event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the
burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored some
young man of letters. And so, when she read aloud the prose of George
Sand, prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral
distinction which Mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above