Landscape ethics

My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labor in vain; like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honorable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec...


Yes this sentence continues, but I'm cutting it off here; it's already too rich. I don't remember why M. Legrandin does not want to tell Marcel's father about his sister. But I love the analogy here, and how Proust never hesitates to veer off into an extended, involved comparison at once too crazily detailed to sound natural and yet, at the same time, all but perfect.