Free In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust Page A

as though not for that purpose, to say that the cordials should be brought out; my grandmother placed a great deal of importance, considering it more amiable, on the idea that they should not seem anything exceptional, and for visitors only. M. Swann, though much younger than he, was very attached to my grandfather, who had been one of the closest friends of his father, an excellent man but peculiar, in whom, apparently, a trifle was sometimes enough to interrupt the ardour of his feelings, change the course of his thinking. Several times a year I would hear my grandfather at the table telling anecdotes, always the same ones, about the behaviour of old M. Swann upon the death of his wife, over whom he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, had rushed to his side at the estate the Swanns owned in the vicinity of Combray and, so that he would not be present at the coffining, managed to entice him for a while, all in tears, out of the death chamber. They walked a short way in the park, where there was a little sun. Suddenly M. Swann, taking my grandfather by the arm, cried out: ‘Oh, my old friend, what a joy it is to be walking here together in such fine weather! Don’t you think it’s pretty, all these trees, these hawthorns! And my pond – which you’ve never congratulated me on! You’re looking as sad as an old dishcloth. Feel that little breeze? Oh, say what you like, life has something to offer despite everything, my dear Amédée!’ Suddenly the memory of his dead wife came back to him and, nodoubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a gesture habitual to him whenever a difficult question came into his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: ‘It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for long at a time.’ ‘Often, but only a little at a time, like poor old Swann,’ had become one of my grandfather’s favourite phrases, which he uttered apropos of the most different sorts of things. I would have thought this father of Swann’s was a monster, if my grandfather, whom I considered a better judge and whose pronouncement, forming a legal precedent for me, often served me later to dismiss offences I might have been inclined to condemn, had not exclaimed: ‘What! He had a heart of gold!’
    For many years, even though, especially before his marriage, the younger M. Swann often came to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and my grandparents did not suspect that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society his family had frequented and that, under the sort of incognito which this name Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring – with the perfect innocence of honest innkeepers who have under their roof, without knowing it, some celebrated highwayman – one of the most elegant members of the Jockey Club, 3 a favourite friend of the Comte de Paris 4 and the Prince of Wales, 5 one of the men most sought after by the high society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
    Our ignorance of this brilliant social life that Swann led was obviously due in part to the reserve and discretion of his character, but also to the fact that bourgeois people in those days formed for themselves a rather Hindu notion of society and considered it to be made up of closed castes, in which each person, from birth, found himself placed in the station which his family occupied and from which nothing, except the accidents of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage, could draw him in order to make him enter a higher caste. M. Swann, the father, was a stockbroker; ‘Swann the son’ would find he belonged for