envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our
own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no
doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family
had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his
daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other
people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and
stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but they
contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been
evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the
depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not
unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together
after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during
our companionable country life. Our friend's bodily frame had been so well
lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his family,
that their own special Swann had become to my people a complete and living
creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving some one I know
for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from
the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann--this
early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my
childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is
like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a
series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a
marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality--this early Swann
abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree,
of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.

And yet one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of a lady
whom she had known at the Sacre Coeur (and with whom, because of our caste
theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in spite of
several common interests), the Marquise de Villeparisis, of the famous