Page 628 - swanns-way

which he was wrapped.
He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte’s
companions, even to mine, for all that he was no longer on
good terms with my family, but without appearing to know
who I was. (This reminded me that he had constantly seen
me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept
out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann
had become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer
the Combray Swann; as the ideas which, nowadays, I made
his name connote were different from the ideas in the sys-
tem of which it was formerly comprised, which I utilised
not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had
become a new, another person; still I attached him by an
artificial thread, secondary and transversal, to our former
guest; and as nothing had any longer any value for me save
in the extent to which my love might profit by it, it was with
a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase
them from my memory that I recaptured the years in which,
in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment be-
fore me in the Champs-Elysées, and to whom, fortunately,
Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so of-
ten, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous by sending to
ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say good-night
to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my fa-
ther and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told
Gilberte that she might play one game; he could wait for a
quarter of an hour; and, sitting down, just like anyone else,
on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with that hand which
Philippe VII had so often held in his own, while we began

628 Swann’s Way