• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1286 0

eluded me. But of that existence no one gave me so strong an impression as did M. Swann, who came a little later to fetch his daughter. For he and Mme Swann—inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, and her lessons, her games, her friendships depended upon them—contained for me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as befitted gods with an all-powerful control over her, in whom it must have had its source, an undefined, an inaccessible quality of melancholy charm. Everything that concerned them was the object of so constant a preoccupation on my part that the days on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so often in the past without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was still on good terms with my parents) came to fetch Gilberte from the Champs-Elysées, once the violent throbbing of my heart provoked by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage about whom one has just been reading a series of books and the minutest details of whose life and person intrigue us. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray, had left me indifferent, became now in my eyes something to be marvelled at, as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they made him stand out vividly against the vulgar background of pedestrians of different classes who encumbered that particular path in the Champs-Elysées, in the midst of whom I admired his condescending to figure without claiming any special deference, which as it happened none of them dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in which he was wrapped.

He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte’s playmates, even to mine, for all that he had fallen out with my family, but without appearing to know me. (This reminded me that he had seen me quite often in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann; since the ideas to which I now connected his name were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, ideas which I no longer utilised when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another person; nevertheless, I attached him by an artificial, secondary and transversal thread to our former guest; and since nothing had henceforth any value for me except so far as my love might profit by it, it was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them that I recalled the years in which, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me in the Champs-Elysées and to whom, fortunately, Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so often, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous by sending to ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say good night to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my father and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte that she had his permission to play one game, that he could wait for a quarter of an hour; and, sitting down just like anyone else on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with that hand which Philippe VII had so often held in his, while we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the pigeons whose beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and, as it were, the lilacs of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on the great stone basin, to which its beak, as it disappeared below the rim, imparted the gesture and assigned the purpose of offering in abundance the fruit or grain at which it appeared to be pecking, another on the head of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those enamelled objects whose polychrome varies the monotony of the stone in certain classical works, and with an attribute which, when the goddess bears it, earns her a particular epithet and makes of her, as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a new divinity.

On one of these sunny days which had failed to fulfil my hopes,