Swanns Way | Page 8

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