is eyes,
and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of
his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for
which he survived her, "It's a funny thing, now; I very often think
of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time."
"Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my
grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of
things. And I should have assumed that this father of Swann's had been
a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than
myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to
pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not
gone on to exclaim, "But, after all, he had a heart of gold."

For many years, albeit--and especially before his marriage--M. Swann
the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and
grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the
kind of society which his family had frequented, or that, under the
sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were
harbouring--with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers
who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know
it--one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend
of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the
men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain.

Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in
the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and
discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days
took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist
of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself
called to that station in life which his parents already occupied,
and nothing, except the chance of a brilliant career or of a 'good'
marriage, could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior
caste. M. Swann, the father, had been a stockbroker; and so 'young
Swann' found himself immured for life in a caste where one's fortune, as
in a list of taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income.
We knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew
his own associates, the people with whom he was 'in a position to mix.'
If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances o