Swann's Way
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