more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark
leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train,
little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look
at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme
was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by
trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament
of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at
once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar,
a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so
unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of
stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a
white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate,
somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it
as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance
from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and
alive.

M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us.
He belonged to a good family, and had once been music-master to
my grandmother's sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and
inheriting some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of
Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. But with his intense
prudishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet
Swann, who had made what he called "a most unsuitable marriage, as
seems to be the fashion in these days." My mother, on hearing that he
'composed,' told him by way of a compliment that, when she came to see
him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would have liked
nothing better, but he carried politeness and consideration for others
to so fine a point, always putting himself in their place, that he was
afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out,
or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day
when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them,
but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil's house,
Montjouvain, stood on a site actually hollowed out from a steep hill
covered with shrubs, among which I took cover, I had found myself on a
level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from its
window. When a servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived,
I had seen M. Vinteuil ru