Page 138 - swanns-way

told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if you please,
expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself)
were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it
happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first,
he had been well received there. It is true that my grandfa-
ther made out that, whenever I formed a strong attachment
to any one of my friends and brought him home with me,
that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have
objected on principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of
Jewish extraction—had he not found that the Jews whom I
chose as friends were not usually of the best type. And so I
was hardly ever able to bring a new friend home without my
grandfather’s humming the ‘O, God of our fathers’ from La
Juive, or else ‘Israel, break thy chain,’ singing the tune alone,
of course, to an ‘um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la”; but I used to be
afraid of my friend’s recognising the sound, and so being
able to reconstruct the words.
Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names,
about which, as often as not, there was nothing particularly
Hebraic, he would divine not only the Jewish origin of such
of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen people, but
even some dark secret which was hidden in their family.
‘And what do they call your friend who is coming this
evening?’
‘Dumont, grandpapa.’
‘Dumont! Oh, I’m frightened of Dumont.’
And he would sing:
Archers, be on your guard! Watch without rest, without
sound,

138 Swann’s Way