Page 627 - swanns-way

no one gave me so strong an impression as did M. Swann,
who came a little later to fetch his daughter. That was be-
cause he and Mme. Swann—inasmuch as their daughter
lived with them, as her lessons, her games, her friendships
depended upon them—contained for me, like Gilberte, per-
haps even more than Gilberte, as befitted subjects that had
an all-powerful control over her in whom it must have had
its source, an undefined, an inaccessible quality of melan-
choly charm. Everything that concerned them was on my
part the object of so constant a preoccupation that the days
on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so
often, long ago, without his having aroused my curiosity,
when he was still on good terms with my parents) came
for Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées, once the pulsations to
which my heart had been excited by the appearance of his
grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the sight of him still
impressed me as might that of an historic personage, upon
whom one had just been studying a series of books, and
the smallest details of whose life one learned with enthu-
siasm. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when
I heard them discussed at Combray, seemed to me unim-
portant, became now in my eyes something marvellous, as
if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they set
him in vivid detachment against the vulgar background of
pedestrians of different classes, who encumbered that par-
ticular path in the Champs-Elysées, in the midst of whom
I admired his condescending to figure without claiming
any special deference, which as it happened none of them
dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in

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