In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [66]
And yet this house, because it had been so passionately desired by Swann, must have kept for him some of its sweetness, if I was to judge by myself for whom it had not lost all its mystery. That singular charm in which I had for so long supposed the life of the Swanns to be bathed had not been entirely exorcised from their house on my being admitted to it: I had made it draw back, overwhelmed as it was by the sight of the stranger, the pariah that I had been, to whom now Mme Swann graciously pushed forward an exquisite, hostile and scandalised armchair for him to sit in; but all around me in my memory, I can perceive it still. Is it because, on the days when M. and Mme Swann invited me to lunch, to go out afterwards with them and Gilberte, I imprinted with my gaze—while I sat waiting for them alone—on the carpet, the sofas, the tables, the screens, the pictures, the idea engraved upon my mind that Mme Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte was about to enter? Is it because those objects have dwelt ever since in my memory side by side with the Swanns, and have gradually acquired something of their identity? Is it because, knowing that they spent their existence among these things, I made of them all as it were emblems of the life and habits of the Swanns from which I had too long been excluded for them not to continue to appear strange to me, even when I was allowed the privilege of sharing in them? However it may be, whenever I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on his part any intention to find fault with his wife’s taste) found so amorphous—because, while it was still conceived in the style, half conservatory half studio, which had been that of the rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had none the less begun to replace in this jumble a number of the Chinese ornaments which she now felt to be rather sham, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs and stools and things draped in old Louis XVI silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai d’Orléans—it has kept in my memory, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm that are not to be found even in the most complete, the least spoiled of the collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain things we see a soul which they afterwards keep and which they develop in our minds. All the ideas that I had formed of the hours, different from those that exist for other men, passed by the Swanns in that house which was to their everyday life what the body is to the soul, and whose singularity it must have expressed, all those ideas were distributed, amalgamated—equally disturbing and indefinable throughout—in the arrangement of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the position of the windows, the ministrations of the servants. When, after lunch, we went to drink our coffee in the sunshine of the great bay window of the drawing-room, as Mme Swann was asking me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not only the silk-covered stool which she pushed towards me that exuded, together with the agonising charm that I had long ago discerned—first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump of laurels—in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had shown to me and which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so well understood and shared that I felt myself unworthy and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its defenceless cushion; a personality, a