ve
to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed
to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there
needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a
vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by
no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil
may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his
adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to
the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that
engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they
can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without
weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not
make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of
its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself
from the point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when he
attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied
in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give
judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely
the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in 'low,' in the
very 'lowest water,' inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late
been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked
above him and to whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they
might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of
rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any
human misfortune.

One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of
Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so
suddenly face to face with us all that he had not time to escape; and
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who,
amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's
shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence, the
outward signs of which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of
the bestower because he feels that they are all the more precious to him
upon whom they are bestowed, conversed