Page 102 - swanns-way

are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations
either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty appli-
cation, scornful, bitter, and conscientious. Tall, with a good
figure, a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair moustaches, a
look of disillusionment in his blue eyes, an almost exagger-
ated refinement of courtesy; a talker such as we had never
heard; he was in the sight of my family, who never ceased
to quote him as an example, the very pattern of a gentle-
man, who took life in the noblest and most delicate manner.
My grandmother alone found fault with him for speak-
ing a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not
using a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Laval-
lière neckties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat.
She was astonished, too, at the furious invective which he
was always launching at the aristocracy, at fashionable life,
and ‘snobbishness’—‘undoubtedly,’ he would say, ‘the sin of
which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of the sin for
which there is no forgiveness.’
Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother
was so little capable of feeling, or indeed of understanding,
that it seemed to her futile to apply so much heat to its con-
demnation. Besides, she thought it in not very good taste
that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country
gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver
himself of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so
far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined
them all.
‘Well met, my friends!’ he would say as he came towards
us. ‘You are lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I

102 Swann’s Way