We're in Paris. The salons are full, the music is playing, and Charles Swann — a well-connected man of the world who's spent his life keeping emotions at arm's length — is about to hear something that undoes all of that.

In this first episode of The Little Phrase, Eve and Elliot introduce Proust's fictional Vinteuil Sonata and the moment the little phrase first appears. Jane reads two passages from In Search of Lost Time — the phrase arriving like a stranger who smiles at you and disappears, and then returning as what Proust calls "the national anthem of their love."

We also listen to music that may have lived in Proust's imagination when he invented Vinteuil: the opening of the fourth movement of César Franck's Violin Sonata, and a movement from Gabriel Fauré's Violin Sonata in A major, written in the 1870s.

About eight minutes. A love story is beginning.

Credits: Proust quotations from In Search of Lost Time (public domain) via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/InSearchOfLostTimeCompleteVolumes · Franck, Violin Sonata in A, 4th mvt. — Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cesar_Franck_-_Sonata_in_A,_4th_movement.ogg — CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 — unmodified · Fauré, Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 13 — courtesy Musopen: https://musopen.org/music/599-violin-sonata-no-1-op-13/ (public domain) · Cover art, episode art, theme, voices & script created with AI assistance.