For what
had happened was that, while I recognised in this passage the same taste
for uncommon phrases, the same bursts of music, the same idealist
philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my
having taken them into account as the source of my pleasure, I now no
longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in
one of Bergotte's works, which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in
outline upon the surface of my mind, but rather of the 'ideal passage' of
Bergotte, common to every one of his books, and to which all the earlier,
similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density
and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.
I was by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary lady; while Dr. du,
Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting until he finished Bergotte's
latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house in a
park near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered of that
taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but now so universally
acclimatised that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe and
America, and even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its refinement,
but in that alone.
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