SWANN'S WAY (Modern Classics Series): In Search of Lost Time (Du Côté De Chez Swann) - Philosophical and Aesthetic Masterpiece that Titillated Even Virginia Woolf's Desire for Expression

by Marcel Proust

Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in the world of fashion

middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes,

immured

an old house which my grandmother longed to visit, but which stood on the Quai d'Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered.

she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty,

shewed a very dull preciseness, not only when he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details,

As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle 'common,'

if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was 'fully qualified' to be received by any of the 'upper middle class,' the most respected barristers and solicitors of Paris

that would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus,

to be content with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray—as the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba,

my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony.

he himself would not be invited, not seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who might be in our house for the first time.

manipulating this creature, so rare and refined at other times and in other places, with the rough simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no more carefully than if it were a penny toy.

Certainly the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from, the Swann created in my great-aunt's mind

none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone,

our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

"seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an inte...

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds ...

these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.

the Swann they had built up for their own purposes

details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face

Our friend's bodily frame had been so well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his family,

their own special Swann had become to my people a complete and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving some one I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann—this

as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality—this

For in her eyes distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position.

the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard,

my grandfather was curious to learn all the little details which might help him to take a mental share in the private lives of men like Mole, the Duc Pasquier, or the Duc de Broglie.

anyone who chose his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred, outside his 'proper station,' was condemned to utter degradation in her eyes.

the son of a lawyer we had known because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours.

my grandmother's two sisters, elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her intelligence,

So complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life

knowing that my grandmother never agreed with her, and not being quite confident that it was her own opinion which the rest of us invariably endorsed,

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.

that was because on the evenings when there were visitors, or just M. Swann in the house, Mamma did not come up to my room.

the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the precise moment in which the door was shut.

the unpleasantness which my family had contrived to make Swann feel since his marriage.

managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

my mind, strained by this foreboding, distended like the look which I shot at my mother, would not allow any other impression to enter. Thoughts did, indeed, enter it, but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of beauty, or even of quaintness, by which I might have been distracted or beguiled.

cried my aunt Céline in a voice which seemed loud because she was so timid, and seemed forced because she had been planning the little speech for so long;

darting, as she spoke, what she called a 'significant glance' at Swann.

my grandfather, in whose mind nature had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for becoming passionately interested in the co-operative movement among the ladies of Sweden

"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensées?"

In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between 'information' and 'publicity.'"

What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!

I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang. "No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs."

must climb each step of the staircase 'against my heart,'

When we have gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water,

it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence.

those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid in his mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh."