Page 480 - swanns-way

sort of thing), he had decided to send her a basket of fruit,
and was not quite sure where or how to order it, he had en-
trusted the task to a cousin of his mother who, delighted to
be doing a commission for him, had written to him, laying
stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit at the
same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality
they were, the straw berries from Jauret, the pears from Ch-
evet, who always had the best, am soon, ‘every fruit visited
and examined, one by one, by myself.’ And ii the sequel, by
the cordiality with which the Princess thanked him, hi had
been able to judge of the flavour of the strawberries and of
the ripe ness of the pears. But, most of all, that ‘every fruit
visited and examinee one by one, by myself’ had brought
balm to his sufferings by carrying hi mind off to a region
which he rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the
heir of a rich and respectable middle-class family in which
had been handed down from generation to generation
the knowledge of the ‘right places’ and the art of ordering
things from shops.
Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was ‘young
Swann’ not to feel, when he assumed that part again for a
moment, a keener pleasure than he was capable of feeling at
other times—when, indeed, he was grown sick of pleasure;
and if the friendliness of the middle-class people, for whom
he had never been anything else than ‘young Swann,’ was
less animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flat-
tering, for all that, since in the middle-class mind friendship
is inseparable from respect), no letter from a Royal Person-
age, offering him some princely entertainment, could ever

480 Swann’s Way