But no one, as it happened, dreamed of speaking. The ineffable
utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know
whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those
two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds,
and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of
the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. It
followed that, when the phrase at last was finished, and only its
fragmentary echoes floated among the subsequent themes which had already
taken its place, if Swann at first was annoyed to see the Comtesse de
Monteriender, famed for her imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide
in him her impressions, before even the sonata had come to an end; he
could not refrain from smiling, and perhaps also found an underlying
sense, which she was incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used.
Dazzled by the virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to
Swann: "It's astonishing! I have never seen anything to beat it..." But a
scrupulous regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she
added the reservation: "anything to beat it.
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