Swann's Way

I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's, whose
grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a
stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to
keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which
adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more
teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which
had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the
school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be
entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me,
half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
permanent object of my thoughts.

Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be
constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in
which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole