Page 197 - swanns-way

a bear. But what I did understand was this, that Legrandin
was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only
for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared
a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses,
and would be so much afraid, when in their company, of
incurring their displeasure that he would never dare to
let them see that he numbered, as well, among his friends
middle-class people, the families of solicitors and stockbro-
kers, preferring, if the truth must be known, that it should
be revealed in his absence, when he was out of earshot, that
judgment should go against him (if so it must) by default:
in a word, he was a snob. Of course he would never have
admitted all or any of this in the poetical language which
my family and I so much admired. And if I asked him, ‘Do
you know the Guermantes family?’ Legrandin the talker
would reply, ‘No, I have never cared to know them.’ But
unfortunately the talker was now subordinated to anoth-
er Legrandin, whom he kept carefully hidden in his breast,
whom he would never consciously exhibit, because this oth-
er could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his
snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for
ever; and this other Legrandin had replied to me already
in that wounded look, that stiffened smile, the undue grav-
ity of his tone in uttering those few words, in the thousand
arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously
been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of snob-
bery:
‘Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guerman-
tes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my life.’

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