It happened now and then that a page of Bergotte
would express precisely those ideas which I used often at night, when I
was unable to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so
concisely and well that his page had the appearance of a collection of
mottoes for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later
years, when I began to compose a book of my own, and the quality of some
of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to
go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent of my sentences in
Bergotte's. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I
could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety
that they should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have detected in my
mind, and in my fear of their not turning out 'true to life,' I had no
time to ask myself whether what I was writing would be pleasant to read!
But indeed there was no kind of language, no kind of ideas which I really
liked, except these. My feverish and unsatisfactory attempts were
themselves a token of my love, a love which brought me no pleasure, but
was, for all that, intense and deep.
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