Page 295 - swanns-way

was so ardent a lover that, once he had got to know almost
all the women of the aristocracy, once they had taught him
all that there was to learn, he had ceased to regard those
naturalisation papers, almost a patent of nobility, which
the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon him, save
as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no in-
trinsic value, which allowed him to improvise a status for
himself in some little hole in the country, or in some ob-
scure quarter of Paris, where the good-looking daughter of
a local squire or solicitor had taken his fancy. For at such
times desire, or love itself, would revive in him a feeling of
vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday
life, although it was, no doubt, the same feeling which had
originally prompted him towards that career as a man of
fashion in which he had squandered his intellectual gifts
upon frivolous amusements, and had made use of his eru-
dition in matters of art only to advise society ladies what
pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses; and this
vanity it was which made him eager to shine, in the sight of
any fair unknown who had captivated him for the moment,
with a brilliance which the name of Swann by itself did not
emit. And he was most eager when the fair unknown was in
humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other men of in-
telligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought
a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and
‘bounders’ that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his
social value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental inge-
nuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast
ever since the world began by people whose importance

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