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By Root 1347 0

of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the mechanics of daily life at Versailles, what Mme de Maintenon ate and drank, or the shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And to the small extent to which this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which Swann was tasting was that he could take refuge for a moment in those few and distant parts of himself which had remained more or less extraneous to his love and to his pain. In this respect the personality which my great-aunt attributed to him as “young Swann,” as distinct from the more individual personality of Charles Swann, was the one in which he was now happiest. Once, wishing to send the Princesse de Parme some fruit for her birthday (and because she could often be of use indirectly to Odette, by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and the like) and not being quite sure how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother who, delighted to do an errand for him, had written to him, when sending him the account, to say that she had not ordered all the fruit from the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always had the best, and so on, “every fruit inspected and examined, one by one, by myself.” And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the Princess thanked him, he had been able to judge of the flavour of the strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that “every fruit inspected and examined, one by one, by myself” had brought balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he rarely visited, although it was his by right as the heir to a rich, upper-middle-class family in which had been handed down from generation to generation the knowledge of the “right places” and the art of placing an order.

Indeed, he had too long forgotten that he was “young Swann” not to feel, when he assumed the role again for a moment, a keener pleasure than those he might have felt at other times but which had palled; and if the friendliness of the bourgeoisie, for whom he had never been anything else than “young Swann,” was less animated than that of the aristocracy (though more flattering, for all that, since with them it is always inseparable from respect), no letter from a royal personage, whatever princely entertainment it offered, could ever be so agreeable to Swann as a letter inviting him to be a witness, or merely to be present, at a wedding in the family of some old friends of his parents, some of whom had kept up with him—like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had invited him to my mother’s wedding—while others barely knew him by sight, but considered themselves in duty bound to show civility to the son, to the worthy successor, of the late M. Swann.

But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of its members, the nobility was in a certain sense also a part of his house, his domestic establishment, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon his brilliant connexions, the same external support, the same solid comfort as when he looked at the fine estates, the fine silver, the fine table-linen which had come to him from his own family. And the thought that, if he were struck down by a sudden illness and confined to the house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to fetch would be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would one day be buried in her own fine sheets, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one’s idea of the skill and patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which in her mind’s eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of all—since in every one of his actions and thoughts