Page 481 - swanns-way

be so attractive to Swann as the letter which asked him to
be a witness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the
family of some old friends of his parents; some of whom
had ‘kept up’ with him, like my grandfather, who, the year
before these events, had invited him to my mother’s wed-
ding, while others barely knew him by sight, but were, they
thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the son, to the
worthy successor of the late M. Swann.
But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured,
with so many of them, the people of fashion, in a certain
sense, were also a part of his house, his service, and his
family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon his brilliant con-
nections, the same external support, the same solid comfort
as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the fine
table-linen which had come down to him from his fore-
bears. And the thought that, if he were seized by a sudden
illness and confined to the house, the people whom his valet
would instinctively run to find would be the Duc de Char-
tres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg and the
Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our
old Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would,
one day, be buried in her own fine clothes, marked with
her name, not darned at all (or so exquisitely darned that
it merely enhanced one’s idea of the skill and patience of
the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which
in her mind’s eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if
not actually of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-es-
teem. But most of all,—since in every one of his actions and
thoughts which had reference to Odette, Swann was con-

481