When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner

SWANN'S WAY

Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One

By Marcel Proust

Translated From The French By C. K. Scott Moncrieff

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1922

Contents

OVERTURE

COMBRAY

SWANN IN LOVE

PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME

OVERTURE

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out

my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to

say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was

time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book

which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I

had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just

been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own,

until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:

a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This

impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not

disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them

from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then

it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former

existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would

separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form

part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I

would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and

restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to

which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark

indeed.

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling

of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the

distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective

the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying

towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for

ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange

place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to

farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his

ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of

being once again at home.

I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my

pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would

strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an

invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a

strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief

a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys!

it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring,

and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made

comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he

heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light

beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned

out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night

in agony with no one to bring him any help.

I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches

only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or

to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness,

to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay

heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I

formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very

soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned

without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever

outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors,

such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which was

effectually dispelled on the day--the dawn of a new era to me--on which

they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event

during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in

making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers; still, as a

measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow

before returning to the world of dreams.

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman

would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some

strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was

on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that

gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating

hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest

of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose

company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her

kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes

happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking

hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like

people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city

that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste

in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory

of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my

dream.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the

hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.

Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant

reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time

that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt

to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning,

after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading,

in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to

sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back

in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the

time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he

gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair,

say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit,

the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space,

and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep

months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough

if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my

consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had

gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was,

I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary

sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an

animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the

cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I

was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very

possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up

out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped

by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of

civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps,

followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by

degrees the component parts of my ego.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon

them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else,

and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened

that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful

attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me

through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy

with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its

tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce

from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together

and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory,

the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it

a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept;

while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape

of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the

darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when

things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected

sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body,

would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where

the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a

passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had

found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would,

for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying,

face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to

myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came

to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who

died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally

preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have

forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the

night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung

by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my

bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days

which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly

penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly

awake.

Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in

another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the

country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished

dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always

take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before

dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the

Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would

still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the

panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence

at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of

pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from

visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in

the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep

instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return

from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary

beacon in the night.

These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than

a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to

where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that

uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running,

we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon

a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in

which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them

all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on

going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the

most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets,

a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper,

all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of

birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in

a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the

outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark

tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire

keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great

cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which

would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a

cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat

whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature

as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from

the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the

fireplace which had therefore remained cold--or rooms in summer, where

I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the

moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the

foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it

might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised

in the focus of a sunbeam--or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful

that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it:

that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling

would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and

to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high

ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys,

and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind

was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of

the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of

a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not

there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which

stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not

looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of

vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end

to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the

exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous

funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched

out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils

sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the

colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression

of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even

completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly

reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but

unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end

with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is

fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never

contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.

Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last

time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding

objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom,

and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain

light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window

overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my

knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid

moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still

believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as

a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend

the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at

Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the

rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what

I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.

At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should

have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my

mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my

melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy

idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally

wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while

we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders

and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness

of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many

colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory

window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of

lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary

impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself,

but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite

endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as

though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place

where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.

Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,

issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the

slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the

castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by

a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the

transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through

a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front

of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation,

wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could

tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides

made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given

me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to

the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly

to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid

of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the

text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest

his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish

Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with

their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself,

being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all

material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his way--by taking

each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the

door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would

float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its

nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a

transubstantiation.

And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which

seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed

around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express

the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into

a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until

I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect

of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very

melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to

me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to

open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious

had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body

for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the

dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard

but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the

same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of

my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the

dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than

ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.

But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed

talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little

parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my

grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the

country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the

very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book

instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make

him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little

man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My

father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an

interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not

to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard,

not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my

grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in

torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker

armchairs, so that they should not get soaked--you would see my

grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing

back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to

imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At

last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths--too

straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any

feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking

all morning if the weather were going to improve--with her keen, jerky

little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by

the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of

my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for

that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the

spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which

always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh

despair.

When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was

one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if

(at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her,

moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs

were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her:

"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For,

simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my

father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to

make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops.

My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to

taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops

all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still

smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards

others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own

troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those

seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save

for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes,

which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow

upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my

great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in

her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile

endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass--all these

were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well

accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a.

happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not,

really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror

that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her

"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" in my

cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when

face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them;

I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room

beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root,

and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between

the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through

the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use,

this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of

Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless

because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock, whenever

my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or

dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew

that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent

uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's

mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those

endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see

passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome

face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired

almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were

walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the

cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an

involuntary tear.

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma

would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted

for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in

which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her

garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited

straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment

of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached

the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as

to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have

appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I

longed to call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but

I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession

which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with

this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies

absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the

need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different

thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional

kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look

displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a

moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held

it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might

drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to

sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in

my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests

to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our 'guests'

were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing

strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at

Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since

his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife)

and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat

in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron

table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and

noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its

ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who

had put it out of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double

peal--timid, oval, gilded--of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once

exclaim "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite

well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud

voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound

natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be

more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that

people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and

then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find

an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise

to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or

two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother

might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed

it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.

And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall from

my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the

enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of

possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: "I

can hear Swann's voice." And, indeed, one could tell him only by his

voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose

and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red

hair, dressed in the Bressant style, because in the garden we used as

little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes: and I would

slip away as though not going for anything in particular, to tell them

to bring out the syrups; for my grandmother made a great point, thinking

it 'nicer' of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the

ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far younger man,

M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an

intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father, an excellent but an

eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often

check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.

Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell

at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the

elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched

day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time,

hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of

Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out

of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was

laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was

a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm

and cried, "Oh, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking

here together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty they are,

all these trees--my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never

congratulated me? You look as glum as a night-cap. Don't you feel this

little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it's good to be alive all the

same, my dear Amédée!" And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife

returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire

into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried

away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which

he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his

mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes,

and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of

his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for

which he survived her, "It's a funny thing, now; I very often think

of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time."

"Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my

grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of

things. And I should have assumed that this father of Swann's had been

a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than

myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to

pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not

gone on to exclaim, "But, after all, he had a heart of gold."

For many years, albeit--and especially before his marriage--M. Swann

the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and

grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the

kind of society which his family had frequented, or that, under the

sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were

harbouring--with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers

who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know

it--one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend

of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the

men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain.

Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in

the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and

discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days

took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist

of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself

called to that station in life which his parents already occupied,

and nothing, except the chance of a brilliant career or of a 'good'

marriage, could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior

caste. M. Swann, the father, had been a stockbroker; and so 'young

Swann' found himself immured for life in a caste where one's fortune, as

in a list of taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income.

We knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew

his own associates, the people with whom he was 'in a position to mix.'

If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on

whom the old friends of the family, like my relatives, shut their eyes

all the more good-naturedly that Swann himself, after he was left an

orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been

ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew

were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat, had

he met them while he was walking with ourselves. Had there been such a

thing as a determination to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar

to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in

his father's position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than

theirs, because, leading a very simple life, and having always had

a craze for 'antiques' and pictures, he now lived and piled up his

collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit,

but which stood on the Quai d'Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my

great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered. "Are you really

a connoisseur, now?" she would say to him; "I ask for your own sake, as

you are likely to have 'fakes' palmed off on you by the dealers," for

she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no

great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would

avoid serious topics and shewed a very dull preciseness, not only when

he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details, but

even when my grandmother's sisters were talking to him about art. When

challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for

some picture, he would remain almost impolitely silent, and would then

make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the

gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been

painted. But as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse

us by telling us the story of his latest adventure--and he would have

a fresh story for us on every occasion--with some one whom we ourselves

knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or our coachman. These

stories certainly used to make my great-aunt laugh, but she could

never tell whether that was on account of the absurd parts which Swann

invariably made himself play in the adventures, or of the wit that he

shewed in telling us of them. "It is easy to see that you are a regular

'character,' M. Swann!"

As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a

trifle 'common,' she would always take care to remark to strangers, when

Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, if he had wished to, have

lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opéra, and that

he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million

francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought

was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann

called on New Year's Day bringing her a little packet of _marrons

glacés_, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say

to him: "Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the Bonded

Vaults, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to

Lyons?" and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her

glasses, at the other visitors.

But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his

capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was 'fully qualified' to be

received by any of the 'upper middle class,' the most respected

barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle

inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another

almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left

our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no

sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and

be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate

of stockbrokers had ever set eyes--that would have seemed to my aunt

as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being

herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would,

when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the

realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which

Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or--to be content

with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it

painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray--as the thought

of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone

and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its

unsuspected treasures.

One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had begged

pardon for being in evening clothes, Françoise, when he had gone, told

us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining "with a

princess." "A pretty sort of princess," drawled my aunt; "I know

them," and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her

knitting, serenely ironical.

Altogether, my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony. Since she was

of the opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations, she

thought it only right and proper that he should never come to see us in

summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden,

and that from each of his visits to Italy he should bring back some

photographs of old masters for me.

It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send to him whenever we wanted

a recipe for some special sauce or for a pineapple salad for one of

our big dinner-parties, to which he himself would not be invited, not

seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who

might be in our house for the first time. If the conversation turned

upon the Princes of the House of France, "Gentlemen, you and I will

never know, will we, and don't want to, do we?" my great-aunt would

say tartly to Swann, who had, perhaps, a letter from Twickenham in his

pocket; she would make him play accompaniments and turn over music on

evenings when my grandmother's sister sang; manipulating this creature,

so rare and refined at other times and in other places, with the rough

simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no

more carefully than if it were a penny toy. Certainly the Swann who was

a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from,

the Swann created in my great-aunt's mind when, of an evening, in our

little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the

gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything she had ever

heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable shape which

began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a background

of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none

of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for

everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or

the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts

of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some

one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the

physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have

already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we

compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In

the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to

follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in

the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent

envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our

own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no

doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family

had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his

daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other

people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and

stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but

they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had

been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant

in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not

unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together

after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during

our companionable country life. Our friend's bodily frame had been so

well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his

family, that their own special Swann had become to my people a complete

and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving

some one I know for another quite different person when, going back in

memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately

to this early Swann--this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the

charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like

his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as

though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits

of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak)

tonality--this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent

of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of

tarragon.

And yet one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of a

lady whom she had known at the Sacré Coeur (and with whom, because of

our caste theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in

spite of several common interests), the Marquise de Villeparisis, of the

famous house of Bouillon, this lady had said to her:

"I think you know M. Swann very well; he is a great friend of my

nephews, the des Laumes."

My grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house,

which overlooked some gardens, and in which Mme. de Villeparisis had

advised her to rent a flat; and also for a repairing tailor and his

daughter, who kept a little shop in the courtyard, into which she had

gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt, which she had torn on the

staircase. My grandmother had found these people perfectly charming: the

girl, she said, was a jewel, and the tailor a most distinguished man,

the finest she had ever seen. For in her eyes distinction was a thing

wholly independent of social position. She was in ecstasies over some

answer the tailor had made, saying to Mamma:

"Sévigné would not have said it better!" and, by way of contrast, of a

nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house:

"My dear, he is so common!"

Now, the effect of that remark about Swann had been, not to raise him

in my great-aunt's estimation, but to lower Mme. de Villeparisis. It

appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we

owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to

do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that

she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and

in allowing members of her family to associate with him. "How should

she know Swann? A lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshal

MacMahon!" This view of Swann's social atmosphere which prevailed in my

family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of

the worst class, you might almost say a 'fast' woman, whom, to do him

justice, he never attempted to introduce to us, for he continued to come

to us alone, though he came more and more seldom; but from whom they

thought they could establish, on the assumption that he had found her

there, the circle, unknown to them, in which he ordinarily moved.

But on one occasion my grandfather read in a newspaper that M. Swann was

one of the most faithful attendants at the Sunday luncheons given by the

Duc de X----, whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent

statesmen in the reign of Louis Philippe. Now my grandfather was curious

to learn all the little details which might help him to take a mental

share in the private lives of men like Mole, the Duc Pasquier, or the

Duc de Broglie. He was delighted to find that Swann associated with

people who had known them. My great-aunt, however, interpreted this

piece of news in a sense discreditable to Swann; for anyone who chose

his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred,

outside his 'proper station,' was condemned to utter degradation in her

eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the

fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position which

prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children's benefit, for

my great-aunt had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer we

had known because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped

down--in her eyes--from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to

that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly,

to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours. She

objected, therefore, to my grandfather's plan of questioning Swann, when

next he came to dine with us, about these people whose friendship with

him we had discovered. On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters,

elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her

intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their

brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were

ladies of lofty ambition, who for that reason were incapable of taking

the least interest in what might be called the 'pinchbeck' things of

life, even when they had an historic value, or, generally speaking, in

anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically

precious. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which

seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their

sense of hearing--which had gradually come to understand its own

futility when the tone of the conversation, at the dinner-table, became

frivolous or merely mundane, without the two old ladies' being able to

guide it back to the topic dear to themselves--would leave its receptive

channels unemployed, so effectively that they were actually becoming

atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of

the two sisters, he would have to make use of some such alarm signals

as mad-doctors adopt in dealing with their distracted patients; as by

beating several times on a glass with the blade of a knife, fixing them

at the same time with a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent

methods which the said doctors are apt to bring with them into their

everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or

because they think the whole world a trifle mad.

Their interest grew, however, when, the day before Swann was to dine

with us, and when he had made them a special present of a case of Asti,

my great-aunt, who had in her hand a copy of the _Figaro_ in which to

the name of a picture then on view in a Corot exhibition were added the

words, "from the collection of M. Charles Swann," asked: "Did you see

that Swann is 'mentioned' in the _Figaro_?"

"But I have always told you," said my grandmother, "that he had plenty

of taste."