The day my parents had gone home to visit, I had together, but they allowed me to stay out, and as the house of Mr. Vinteuil Montjouvain, was down against a bushy mound, where I hid myself, I had found a level with the lounge on the second floor, two feet of the window. When we had come to announce my parents, I had seen Mr. Vinteuil hasten to emphasize on a piece of piano music. But when my parents came, he had removed and put in a corner. Without doubt he had feared they suggest that he was happy to see that their playing his compositions. And every time my mother had returned to the charge during the visit, he repeated several times, “But I do not know who put it on the piano, this is no place” and had diverted the conversation other subjects, precisely because those least interested. His only passion was for his daughter and that it looked like a boy seemed so strong that one could not help smiling when he saw the precautions she took to her father, always shawls additional to throw over the shoulders. My grandmother remarked how soft expression delicate, almost timid was often in the eyes of this child so hard, his face was covered with freckles. When she had uttered a word she heard the spirit of those to whom she had known, alarmed at the possible misunderstandings and you could light up, stand out as for transparency, under the figure of the mannish ” good fellow, “the finer features of a young girl weeping.

When, on leaving the church, I knelt before the altar, I felt all of a sudden, I rose, hawthorn escape the smell of bitter and sweet almonds, and I noticed while on flowers small squares over blondes, under which I imagined that would be hidden in the smell as the parties gratin taste of frangipane or under the freckled cheeks Vinteuil. Despite the quiet stillness of the hawthorn, the intermittent heat was like the murmur of their intense life which vibrated the altar and a rustic fence visited by living antennae, which we thought seeing some almost red stamens that appear to have kept the virulence spring, the irritant, now transformed into insect flowers.