Proust made Swann a financier, a Jew, and gave him a German name, because, I think, he wished to indicate to our subconscious judgments a cause of Swann’s curious racial patience, his waiting on and deference to the caprice of others. He allows life “to ride” him, Mme. Verdurin to patronise him, Odette to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. Swann, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements. For Swann doesn’t act; things happen to him. Even his deep and pertinacious affection is discounted by the inferior object of it. He is the golden mean in man, no more a crank than we would all be if we were rich, with weaknesses that we could, if we would, translate into heroisms. Most cultivated women infallibly must have loved Swann—he is probably, therefore, of the kind that finds only the Odettes of the world to its liking. VIOLET HUNT. XV _M. VINTEUIL’S SONATA_ It has never been published, never, so far as I can ascertain, been performed in any of our concert-halls. Indeed, its largest audience must have been the fashionable one which gathered for the _soirée musicale_ given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, when Mme. de Cambremer’s head wagged to its rhythm like a metronome, and the Princesse des Laumes, to show that she was listening, beat time now and again with her fan; but, so as not to forfeit her independence, beat a different time from the musicians’. But most frequently it was to be heard in a piano arrangement played at Mme. Verdurin’s for the benefit of her “little clan,” which then included Odette de Crécy and, for a time, Charles Swann, by a pianist whom Madame had taken under her patronage, declaring that he left Planté and Rubinstein “sitting”; and, later, when she had become Mme. Swann, by Odette herself, when it first came to the notice of that most acute of critics, the narrator in _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_.