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shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly be-
nevolence, the outward signs of which serve to enhance and
gratify the self-esteem of the bestower because he feels that
they are all the more precious to him upon whom they are
bestowed, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil, with
whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms,
and invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter
over, one day, to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation
which, two years earlier, would have enraged M. Vinteuil,
but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt
himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accept-
ing. Swann’s friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him
to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his
cause that he felt it would perhaps be better to make no use
of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of keep-
ing it in reserve.
‘What a charming man!’ he said to us, after Swann had
gone, with the same enthusiasm and veneration which
make clever and pretty women of the middle classes fall
victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a duch-
ess, even though she be ugly and a fool. ‘What a charming
man! What a pity that he should have made such a deplor-
able marriage!’
And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in
even the most sincere of men, who cast off, while they are
talking to anyone, the opinion they actually hold of him and
will express when he is no longer there, my family joined
with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann’s marriage, invok-
ing principles and conventions which (all the more because

230 Swann’s Way