In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [55]
As for Swann himself, he still often called on some of his former acquaintances, who, of course, belonged to the very highest society. And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been to see I noticed that, among those whom he had known in the old days, the choice that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly artistic, partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And remarking that it was often some Bohemian noblewoman who interested him because she had been the mistress of Liszt or because one of Balzac’s novels had been dedicated to her grandmother (as he would purchase a drawing if Chateaubriand had written about it), I conceived a suspicion that we had, at Combray, replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as a rich bourgeois who did not go into society, by another, when we supposed him to be one of the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of the Comte de Paris means nothing at all. Is not the world full of such “friends of princes,” who would not be received in any house that was at all exclusive? Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.
But Swann was not content with seeking in society, and fastening on the names which the past has inscribed on its roll and which are still to be read there, a simple artistic and literary pleasure; he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogeneous elements, by bringing together people taken at random here, there and everywhere. These amusing (to Swann) sociological experiments did not always provoke an identical reaction from all his wife’s friends. “I’m thinking of asking the Cottards to meet the Duchesse de Vendôme,” he would say to Mme Bontemps with a laugh, in the zestful tone of an epicure who has thought of and intends to try substituting cayenne pepper for cloves in a sauce. But this plan, which might indeed appear agreeable to the Cottards, was calculated to infuriate Mme Bontemps. She herself had recently been introduced by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and had found this as agreeable as it seemed to her natural. The thought of being able to boast about it at the Cottards’ had been by no means the least savoury ingredient of her pleasure. But like those persons recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her own circle should be made known to the Princess. She inwardly cursed the depraved taste which caused Swann, in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, to destroy at one swoop the dazzling impression she had made on the Cottards when she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. How was she even to dare to announce to her husband that the Professor and his wife were in their turn to partake of this pleasure of which she had boasted to him as though it were unique. If only the Cottards could be made to know that they were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their host! It is true that the Bontemps had been invited