de Charlus, from Léa to Morel. I asked myself whether Léa might not have mentioned him to Albertine. The words: “You bad woman, you naughty old girl” came to my horrified mind. But precisely because Vinteuil’s music was in this way painfully associated with Léa⁠—and no longer with Mlle. Vinteuil and her friend⁠—when the grief that Léa caused me was soothed, I could then listen to this music without pain; one malady had made me immune to any possibility of the others. In this music of Vinteuil, phrases that I had not noticed at Mme. Verdurin’s, obscure phantoms that were then indistinct, turned into dazzling architectural structures; and some of them became friends, whom I had barely made out at first, who at best had appeared to me to be ugly, so that I could never have supposed that they were like those people, unattractive at first sight, whom we discover to be what they really are only after we have come to know them well. From one state to the other was a positive transmutation. On the other hand, phrases that I had distinguished at once in the music that I had heard at