Swanns Way | Page 9

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