“I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was angry with us,” he said, “because among all those people in their Sunday clothes there is something about him, with his little cutaway coat and his soft neckties, so little ‘dressed-up,’ so genuinely simple; an air of innocence, almost, which is really attractive.”

But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that my father had imagined the whole thing, or that Legrandin, at the moment in question, had been preoccupied in thinking about something else. Anyhow, my father’s fears were dissipated no later than the following evening. As we returned from a long walk we saw, near the Pont-Vieux, Legrandin himself, who, on account of the holidays, was spending a few days more in Combray. He came up to us with outstretched hand: “Do you know, master booklover,” he asked me, “this line of Paul Desjardins?

Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.