Swann's Way
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