“I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed!” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro .

“Yes,” aunt Céline went one better. “When they write about things or people in whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it⁠—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées