made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map
which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground. What had to
move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance--moved. But its minute
shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with utmost
delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet
was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon this
surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most distant
sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the
town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the impression
they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their 'pianissimo'
execution, like those movements on muted strings so well performed by the
orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does not lose a single
note, one thinks all the same that they are being played somewhere
outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all the old
subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had given them
his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught the distant
approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner of
the Rue de Trevise.

I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which none
could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents'
hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would have
imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only some
really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they had given
me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of other
children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which I needed
to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now distinguish the
common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to a nervous impulse.
But such words as these last had never been uttered in my hearing; no one