But we may find ample corroboration of Swann’s testimony to the excellence of this work in the comments of that acute critic already mentioned. Although he has preferred to remain anonymous himself, it will be convenient for purposes of reference to find him a name, and the name which for some odd reason or other flows from my pen is “Marcel Proust.” Well, this young “Proust,” when he heard Mme. Swann play the Sonata, was much impressed, though he also had some difficulty in grasping the music at first. He goes into the question much more deeply than the dilettante Swann, and begins by asking whether it is not wrong to talk about “hearing a thing for the first time,” when nothing has been understood. The second and third times are from this point of view just as much “first times.” Then he makes the vital discovery that probably what fails us the first time is not our intelligence but our memory. “For our memory,” he says, “compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep dreams of a thousand things and at once forgets them.... Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard two or three times, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and can repeat it by heart next morning.... So, where Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a name which one tries in vain to recall.... And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil’s Sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives.”[11] [Footnote 11: [Transcriber’s Note: See next footnote.]] But “Proust” also carried away from his first hearing the recollection of a phrase; and, since it seems to have been the fate of M. Vinteuil’s work to become implicated in the love affairs of its admirers, we find him at Balbec contemplating his new friend Albertine thus: “I seized the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the Sonata, and which my recollection had allowed to wander from the _Andante_ to the _Finale_, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the _Scherzo_, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose.”[12]