And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have
known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of
her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in
which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those
beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them
continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and
an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without
interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in
either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. But when
M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself from the point of view of
the world, and of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by
her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of
their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and
her social condemnation in precisely the terms which the inhabitant of
Combray most hostile to him and his daughter would have employed; he saw
himself and her in 'low,' in the very 'lowest water,' inextricably
stranded; and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that
respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he must now look up
(however far beneath him they might hitherto have been), that tendency to
search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost
mechanical result of any human misfortune.
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