Swann's Way

our big dinner-parties, to which he himself would not be invited, not
seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who
might be in our house for the first time. If the conversation turned
upon the Princes of the House of France, "Gentlemen, you and I will
never know, will we, and don't want to, do we?" my great-aunt would
say tartly to Swann, who had, perhaps, a letter from Twickenham in his
pocket; she would make him play accompaniments and turn over music on
evenings when my grandmother's sister sang; manipulating this creature,
so rare and refined at other times and in other places, with the rough
simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no
more carefully than if it were a penny toy. Certainly the Swann who was
a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from,
the Swann created in my great-aunt's mind when, of an evening, in our
little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the
gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything she had ever
heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable shape which
began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a background