was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes,
under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red hair, dressed in the
Bressant style, because in the garden we used as little light as possible,
so as not to attract mosquitoes: and I would slip away as though not going
for anything in particular, to tell them to bring out the syrups; for my
grandmother made a great point, thinking it 'nicer/ of their not being
allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors
only. Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my
grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's
father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing
would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the
current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would
hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the
behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose
bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him
for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on
the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping
profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when
the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park,
where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather
by the arm and cried, "Oh, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be
walking here together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty
they are, all these trees--my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you
have never congratulated me? You look as glum as a night-cap. Don't you
feel this little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it's good to be alive
all the same, my dear Amedee!" And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead
wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire
into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away
by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he
habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: