from Swann's Way, pour vous

Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a delightful mind, so individual, he has his own way of saying things, which is a little far-fetched, but so agreeable. You never need to look for the signature, you can tell his work at once." But none of them would go so far as to say "He's a great writer, he has great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realise that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.

***

These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by irritating my father, who, seeing him come in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather? Has it been raining? I can't understand it; the barometer was set fair."
Which drew from Bloch nothing more than: "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them."
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As if there could be anything more interesting! He's an imbecile."
Next Bloch had displeased my grandmother because once, after lunch, when she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped tears from his eyes.
"How can he possibly be sincere," she observed to me. "Why, he doesn't even know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour and a half late for dinner and covered with mud from head to foot, and made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing about that of those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch."

***

I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the subject alone, as in the first dawn of love when we go every day to meet a woman at some party or entertainment which we think is in itself the attraction.