A French uncle of mine once took me as a boy to visit a distinguished mathematician who lived with his melons and his roses on the outskirts of a small town in the Lyonnais. On the way thither I was admonished not to interrupt with foolish questions what I was given to suppose would be an important inquiry by two learned men into the origin of the universe: Monsieur X—— would never have me inside his house again if I could not behave myself better than most of the children of the present day. We waited for our host in a large musty room of subdued sunlight, where not even a fly buzzed and where the only hint of life was the shadow of a passing bird across the yellow blind or the quivering filigree of a reflected bough. Presently Monsieur X—— came in to greet us; but without showing any inclination to discuss philosophy with my uncle he led us to some chairs and a table set out upon the sparse turf under what I think must have been a big catalpa tree. Here he heaped my plate with cakes and fruit and sweets, insisted that I was old enough to drink two glasses of a cordial, and, when he did begin to talk, talked most entertainingly about his neighbours. Gratitude may be childhood’s greatest embarrassment; not merely the verbal expression of thanks, but the emotion itself, which the more deeply it is felt, the more miserably it is involved in shame. As we grow older, we learn what is called politeness; and although we are still capable of being confused by and of actually suffering from excess of gratitude, we have learnt to cover that speechless confusion and pain with a glib phrase like ‘I do not know how to thank you.’ But the child’s silence does convey the depth of his gratitude; and even as I hung my head in silent embarrassment when I was invited to thank Monsieur X—— for his kindness, so now when I ought to be thanking Marcel Proust, against interrupting whose discourse I have been as it were warned by the respect accorded to him by our uncles the critics, but who when I met him as a reader filled my plate with one delicious fruit and sweet and cake after another (steeped those cakes in tisane of limeflowers or tea), I feel incapable of expressing gratitude; and I fear to indulge in criticism, lest I should be just one more uncle standing between Proust and that innocent, appreciative, timorous, awkward child, the public.