Take, for instance, the account of the famous author “Bergotte.” Proust, little more than a child, but already his ardent reader, meets him at luncheon. And, first, the boy’s imagined author, a “langoureux vieillard,” has to give place to the reality, much younger, a little man with a chin-tuft and a nose like a snail-shell. Then comes an elaborate description of his spoken diction, pronunciation, etc., and an attempt to reconcile these with the peculiarities of his written style. Special “notes”: Doubtless, again, so as to distinguish himself from the previous generation, too fond as it had been of abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would bring into prominence, what he would quote with approval, would always be some scene that furnished the reader with an image, some picture that had no rational significance. “Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it is quite admirable! There is a little girl in an orange shawl. It is excellent!” Or again, “Oh, yes, there is a passage in which there is a regiment marching along the street; yes, it is excellent!” As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky), for the word that always came to his lips when he wished to praise the style of any writer was “mild.” “Yes, you know, I like Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_; he seems to me to be milder.” He said the word like a doctor who, when his patient assures him that milk will give him indigestion, answers: “But, you know, it’s very mild.” And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we now find it hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern tongues, in which effects of that kind are not sought.[5] [Footnote 5: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]] It is, further, explained how this man of genius came to pay court to his intellectual inferiors with an eye on the Academy, and how, while his own private morals were bad, the moral tone of his books was of the loftiest.