fit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called
'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or
a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long
desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted
them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than
to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to
have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places.
But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the
picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity
and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical
nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a
subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality,
at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was
art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of
art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains
of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some
great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me
photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of
Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which
were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer
had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the
beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he
resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's
interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity,
my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still
further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved,
preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of
association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a
masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as
Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled
by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of
interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The idea
which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to
have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far