Free In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust Page B

his entire life to a caste in which fortunes varied, asin a tax bracket, between such and such fixed incomes. One knew which had been his father’s associations, one therefore knew which were his own, with which people he was ‘in a position’ to consort. If he knew others, these were bachelor acquaintances on whom old friends of the family, as were my relatives, would close their eyes all the more benignly because he continued, after losing his parents, to come faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that these people whom he saw, who were unknown to us, were the sort he would not have dared greet had he encountered them when he was with us. If you were determined to assign Swann a social coefficient that was personal to him, among the other sons of stockbrokers in a position equal to that of his parents, this coefficient would have been a little lower for him because, very simple in his manner and having always had a ‘craze’ for antiques and for painting, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old townhouse which my grandmother dreamed of visiting, but which was situated on the quai d’Orléans, a part of town where my great-aunt felt it was ignominious to live. ‘But are you a connoisseur? I ask for your own sake, because you’re likely to let the dealers unload some awful daubs on you,’ my great-aunt would say to him; in fact she did not assume he had any competence and even from an intellectual point of view had no very high opinion of a man who in conversation avoided serious subjects and showed a very prosaic preciseness not only when he gave us cooking recipes, entering into the smallest details, but even when my grandmother’s sisters talked about artistic subjects. Challenged by them to give his opinion, to express his admiration for a painting, he maintained an almost ungracious silence and, on the other hand, redeemed himself if he could provide about the museum in which it was to be found, about the date at which it had been painted, a material piece of information. But usually he would content himself with trying to entertain us by telling a new story each time about something that had just happened to him involving people selected from among those we knew, the Combray pharmacist, our cook, our coachman. Certainly these tales made my great-aunt laugh, but she could not distinguish clearly if this was because of the absurd role Swann always assigned himself or because of the wit he put into telling them: ‘You are quite a character,Monsieur Swann!’ Being the only rather vulgar person in our family, she took care to point out to strangers, when they were talking about Swann, that, had he wanted to, he could have lived on the boulevard Haussmann or the avenue de l’Opéra, that he was the son of M. Swann, who must have left four or five million, but that this was his whim. A whim that she felt moreover must be so amusing to others that in Paris, when M. Swann came on New Year’s Day to bring her her bag of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there was company, to say to him: ‘Well, Monsieur Swann! Do you still live next-door to the wine depot, so as to be sure of not missing the train when you go to Lyon?’ And she would look out of the corner of her eye, over her lorgnon, at the other visitors.
    But if anyone had told my great-aunt that this Swann, who, as the son of old M. Swann, was perfectly ‘qualified’ to be received by all the ‘best of the bourgeoisie’, by the most respected notaries or lawyers of Paris (a hereditary privilege he seemed somewhat inclined to let lapse), had, as though in secret, quite a different life; that on leaving our house, in Paris, after telling us he was going home to bed, he retraced his steps as soon as he had turned the corner and went to a certain drawing-room that no eye of any broker or broker’s associate would ever contemplate, this would have seemed