But suppose my great aunt had been told that this Swann—who as the son of Swann was eminently qualified to be received by all the “belle bourgeoisie,” by the most esteemed bureaucrats and lawmakers of Paris (a privilege he apparently rather squandered)—had, as if in secret, an entirely different life; that after leaving our house in Paris, saying he was heading home to sleep, he’d scarcely get round the corner before setting off again and delivering himself to a salon that no broker or broker’s associate had ever set eyes on; to my aunt it would have seemed as extraordinary as for a more literate lady to think of being personally linked to Aristaeus, to understand that after having a chat with her, he’d dive down to the depths of the realms of Thetis, an empire hidden from mortal eyes where Virgil shows him received with open arms; or, to stick to an image more likely to come to her mind, as she’d seen it painted on our Combray petits-fours plates—to have hosted a dinner for Ali-Baba, who, once he finds himself alone, will enter the dazzling cave of unsuspected treasures.

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Our ignorance of this brilliant worldly life Swann led apparently arose in part from the reserve and discretion of his character, but also from the bourgeoisie back then having a somewhat Hindu idea of society, considering it composed of distinct castes, so everyone from birth found themselves placed in the rank their parents occupied, and nothing, apart from the accident of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage, could gain someone entry to a superior class.

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For many years, especially before his marriage, even though Monsieur Swann, the son, often came to visit at Combray, my great aunt and grandparents never suspected he no longer moved at all in the society his family had frequented and that, behind a kind of incognito created in us by the familiar name Swann, they were sheltering—with the perfect innocence of honest hoteliers that have among them, unwittingly, a celebrated brigand—one of the most elegant members of the Jockey Club, a favored friend of the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales, one of the most pampered high-society men of Faubourg Saint-Germain.

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We’d all wait in suspense for the news my grandmother brought us of the enemy, as if we could choose from a great number of possible assailants, and soon enough my grandfather would say: “I know that voice, it’s Swann.” We wouldn’t have recognized Swann but for his voice, actually, we only poorly made out his face, with its hooked nose, its green eyes, beneath a high forehead ringed by blond, almost red hair, worn Bressant-style, because we’d keep the garden lights low as possible in order not to attract mosquitoes, and I’d steal away discreetly to request that the sirops be brought out; my grandmother, believing it courteous, insisted no one should appear to go to any extra trouble, just on account of these visits.

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My only consolation, when I’d go up to my room, was that Maman would come and kiss me once I was in bed. But this goodnight would last so little time, she’d go back downstairs so fast, that when I’d hear her climbing up, then hear at the hallway’s double doors the gentle rustle of her blue muslin garden dress, from which would hang little cords of woven straw, it would be for me a sorrowful moment.

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When these garden walks of my grandmother’s took place after dinner, one thing had the power to bring her back; this was—at a moment when the revolutions of her walk would return her periodically, like an insect, near the lights of the little salon where the liqueurs would be served on the card table—if my great aunt called to her, “Bathilde! Come stop your husband from drinking the cognac!” To make fun of her, in fact (she’d brought into my father’s family such a different sort of spirit that everyone would tease her and torment her), since liqueurs were forbidden for my grandfather, my great aunt would make him drink a few drops.

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After dinner, alas, I’d soon be obliged to leave Maman, who’d stay to chat with the others, in the garden if the weather were fine, in the little salon where everyone retired if the weather instead were bad. Everyone, that is, except my grandmother, who thought “it’s a pity to stay shut in in the country” and who’d have incessant discussions with my father, on days it rained too hard, when he’d send me to read in my room instead of my staying outside.

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Of course I’d see some charm in these brilliant projections that seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and cast reflections of such an ancient story around me. But all the same I cannot describe what misery it would cause me, this intrusion of mystery and beauty in a room I had finally filled with my self, to the point of no longer paying attention to the space, but to me.

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Driving his horse with jolting steps, Golo, flush with a frightful plan, set forth from the little triangle of forest that spread like deep green velvet on the slope of a hill, and advanced by leaps toward the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off by a curving line that was none other than the edge of an oval of glass lodged in the frame slid between slots on the lantern.

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At Combray, each day near afternoon’s end, long before the moment came to put myself to bed and lie there, sleepless, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom would become once more the fixed and painful point of my preoccupations. The grownups had even devised a ruse, to distract me on evenings when I looked too unhappy, of giving me a magic lantern, with which, while waiting for dinner, they would cover my lamp; and, echoing the early architects and glass-masters of the gothic age, the lantern replaced the walls’ opacity with impalpable iridescence, with supernatural multicolored apparitions, depicting legends as if in a flickering and ephemeral stained-glass window.

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