In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [86]
The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had for so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost tender tone he invariably adopted towards them in their presence. Certainly a person like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating any of us to the blandishments which I had heard Bergotte lavishing upon Swann. Even to the people whom she liked, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things. But behind their backs she would never have uttered a word to which they might not have listened. There was nothing less like the social world than our society at Combray. The Swanns’ was already a step on the way to it, towards its inconstant waters. If they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the estuary. “This is all between ourselves,” said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: “I never repeat things.” That is the ritual phrase of society people, from which the slanderer always derives a false reassurance. It is what I would have said then and there to Bergotte—for one does not invent everything one says, especially when one is acting merely as a social being—but I did not yet know the formula. What my great-aunt, on the other hand, would have said on a similar occasion was: “If you don’t wish it to be repeated, why do you say it?” That is the answer of the unsociable, of the dissenter. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my head in silence.
Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance had to intrigue for years before they succeeded in forming with Bergotte relations which remained always dimly literary and never emerged beyond the four walls of his study, whereas I had now been installed among the friends of the great writer, straight off and without any effort, like someone who, instead of standing in a queue for hours in order to secure a bad seat in a theatre, is shown in at once to the best, having entered by a door that is closed to the public. If Swann had thus opened such a door to me, it was doubtless because, just as a king finds himself naturally inviting his children’s friends into the royal box, or on board the royal yacht, so Gilberte’s parents received their daughter’s friends among all the precious things that they had in their house and the even more precious intimacies that were enshrined there. But at the time I thought, and perhaps was right in thinking, that this friendliness on Swann’s part was aimed indirectly at my parents. I seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he had suggested to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he should take me to dine with him, and that my parents had declined, saying that I was too young and too highly strung to “go out.” My parents doubtless represented to certain other people (precisely those who seemed to me the most wonderful) something quite different from what they were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my father a tribute of which he had shown himself so unworthy, I should have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just received and, to show their gratitude to that generous and courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any more conscious of its value than the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair in Luini’s fresco, to whom, it was said, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.
Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, on returning home, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my parents in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion equal to my own and would determine them upon some immense and decisive gesture towards the Swanns, did not appear to be greatly appreciated by them. “Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An excellent acquaintance, a charming relationship!