Page 638 - swanns-way

always has been. She’s the widow of a bailiff. You can’t re-
member, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have
to avoid her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was al-
ways trying to get hold of me—I didn’t know the woman,
of course—to tell me that you were ‘much too nice-look-
ing for a boy.’ She has always had an insane desire to get to
know people, and she must be quite insane, as I have always
thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if
she does come of very common people, I have never heard
anything said against her character. But she must always
be forcing herself upon strangers. She is, really, a horrible
woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is always creat-
ing awkward situations.’
As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent
the whole time, when I was at table, in drawing my finger
along my nose and in rubbing my eyes. My father would
exclaim: ‘The child’s a perfect idiot, he’s becoming quite
impossible.’ More than all else I should have liked to be
as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so
extraordinary that I found it impossible to believe that peo-
ple whom I knew and often saw knew him also, and that
in the course of the day anyone might run against him.
And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did
every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she
had done that afternoon, merely by the words: ‘By the way,
guess whom I saw at the Trois Quartiers—at the umbrella
counter—Swann!’ caused to burst open in the midst of her
narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a
melancholy satisfaction to learn that, that very afternoon,

638 Swann’s Way