In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

Well, it was these ‘thoughts’ of Victor Hugo (almost as entirely absent from the Légende des Siècles as ‘airs,’ as ‘melodies’ are from Wagner’s later manner) that Mme. de Guermantes admired in the early Hugo. Nor was she altogether wrong. They were touching, and already round about them, without their form’s having yet the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes put them beyond comparison with the lines that one might discover in a Corneille, for example, lines in which a Romanticism that is intermittent, restrained and so all the more moving, nevertheless has not at all penetrated to the physical sources of life, modified the unconscious and generalisable organism in which the idea is latent.