recipe for some special sauce or for a pineapple salad for one of 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 of shadows, and could at last be identified by
the sound of its voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details
of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole,
which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in
an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created
by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as
"seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We
pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we
have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we
compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In
the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to
follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the
sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent