Page 641 - swanns-way

the other houses built at the same period in the neighbour-
hood of the Bois, so Swann’s family seemed to them to be in
the same category as many other families of stockbrokers.
Their judgment was more or less favourable according to
the extent to which the family in question shared in merits
that were common to the rest of the universe, and there was
about it nothing that they could call unique. What, on the
other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found
in equal, if not in greater measure elsewhere. And so, af-
ter admitting that the house was in a good position, they
would go on to speak of some other house that was in a bet-
ter, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of financiers on
a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they
had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was
a mistake which was very soon corrected. For in order to
distinguish in all Gilberte’s surroundings an indefinable
quality analogous, in the scale of emotions, to what in the
scale of colours is called infra-red, a supplementary sense of
perception was required, with which love, for the time be-
ing, had endowed me; and this my parents lacked.
On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she
would not be coming to the Champs-Elysées, I would try
to arrange my walks so that I should be brought into some
kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead Fran-
çoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns
lived, making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had
learned from the governess with regard to Mme. Swann. ‘It
seems, she puts great faith in medals. She would never think
of starting on a journey if she had heard an owl hoot, or the

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