ark to strangers, when
Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, if he had wished to, have
lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opera, and that
he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million
francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought
was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann
called on New Year's Day bringing her a little packet of _marrons
glaces_, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say
to him: "Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the Bonded
Vaults, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to
Lyons?" and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her
glasses, at the other visitors.

But 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 (though he was perhaps a trifle
inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another
almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left
our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no
sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and
be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate
of stockbrokers had ever set eyes--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, of knowing that he would,
when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the
realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which
Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or--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, who, as soon as he found himself alone
and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its
unsuspected treasures.

One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had begged
pardon for being in evening clothes, Francoise, when he had gone, told
us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining "with a
princess." "A pretty sort of princess," drawled my aunt; "I know
them," and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her
knitting, serene