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“But he often used to come at Combray.”

“Yes, I know he used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris, he has other things to do, and so have I. But I can promise you, we didn’t look in the least like people who had quarrelled. We were kept waiting there for some time, while they brought him his parcel. He asked after you; he told me you played with his daughter,” my mother went on, dazzling me with the stupendous revelation that I existed in Swann’s mind; even more, that I existed in so complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my mother was, and had been able to bring together around my capacity as his daughter’s playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connexions, the place where we lived, and certain details of our past life which were perhaps unknown even to me. But my mother did not seem to have discovered a particular charm in that counter at the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at the moment when he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had sufficient memories in common to impel him to go up to her and greet her.

Nor did either she or my father seem to find, in speaking of Swann’s family, or the title of honorary stockbroker, a pleasure that surpassed all others. My imagination had isolated and hallowed in social Paris a certain family, just as it had set apart in structural Paris a certain house, whose entrance it had sculpted and its windows bejewelled. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as my father and mother regarded the house in which Swann lived as identical with the other houses built at the same period in the neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann’s family seemed to them to be in the same category as many other families of stockbrokers. They judged it more or less favourably according to the degree to which it shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe and saw nothing unique in it. On the contrary, what they appreciated in it they found in equal if not superior degree elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of financiers who were a cut above her grandfather; and if they had appeared for a moment to be of my opinion, that was through a misunderstanding which was very soon dispelled. For in order to distinguish in everything that surrounded Gilberte an indefinable quality analogous in the world of the emotions to what in the world of colours is called infra-red, my parents would have needed that supplementary sense with which love had temporarily endowed me.

On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to the Champs-Elysées, I tried to arrange my walks so that I should be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would take Françoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess with regard to Mme Swann. “It seems she’s got great faith in medals. She wouldn’t think of starting on a journey if she’d heard an owl hoot, or a sort of tick-tock in the wall, or if she’d seen a cat at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she’s a most religious lady, she is!” I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if, on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my emotion would bring me to a standstill and I would gaze at his white whiskers with eyes filled with passion. Françoise would say: “What’s wrong with you now?”

Then we would continue on our way until we reached their gateway, where a porter, different from every other porter in the world and saturated, down to the very braid on his livery, with the same melancholy charm that I sensed in the name of Gilberte, looked as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prohibit from penetrating into the