the pulsations to which my heart had been excited
by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the
sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage,
upon whom one had just been studying a series of books, and the smallest
details of whose life one learned with enthusiasm. His relations with
the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray,
seemed to me unimportant, became now in my eyes something marvellous,
as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they set him
in vivid detachment against the vulgar background of pedestrians
of different classes, who encumbered that particular path in the
Champs-Elysees, in the midst of whom I admired his condescending to
figure without claiming any special deference, which as it happened none
of them dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in which he
was wrapped.

He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte's companions, even
to mine, for all that he was no longer on good terms with my family,
but without appearing to know who I was. (This reminded me that he had
constantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but
kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had
become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann;
as the ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different
from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, which
I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had
become a new, another person; still I attached him by an artificial
thread, secondary and transversal, to our former guest; and as nothing
had any longer any value for me save in the extent to which my love
might profit by it, it was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not
being able to erase them from my memory that I recaptured the years in
which, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me
in the Champs-Elysees, and to whom, fortunately, Gilberte had perhaps
not mentioned my name, I had so often, in the evenings, made myself
ridiculous by sending to ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say
good-night to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my father
and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte that
she might play one game; he could wait for a quarter of an hour; and,
sitting down, just like anyone else, on an iron chair, paid for his
ticket with that hand wh