heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme.
Blatin.

"Oh, now I know whom you mean," cried my mother, while I felt myself
grow red all over with shame. "On guard! on guard!--as your grandfather
says. And so it's she that you think so wonderful? Why, she's perfectly
horrible, and always has been. She's the widow of a bailiff. You can't
remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have to avoid
her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was always trying to get hold
of me--I didn't know the woman, of course--to tell me that you were
'much too nice-looking for a boy.' She has always had an insane desire
to get to know people, and she must be quite insane, as I have always
thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if she does come
of very common people, I have never heard anything said against her
character. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She
is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is
always creating awkward situations."

As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time,
when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing
my eyes. My father would exclaim: "The child's a perfect idiot, he's
becoming quite impossible." More than all else I should have liked to
be as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary
that I found it impossible to believe that people whom I knew and often
saw knew him also, and that in the course of the day anyone might run
against him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did
every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that
afternoon, merely by the words: "By the way, guess whom I saw at the
Trois Quartiers--at the umbrella counter--Swann!" caused to burst open
in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom.
What a melancholy satisfaction to learn that, that very afternoon,
threading through the crowd his supernatural form, Swann had gone to
buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but
all equally unimportant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar
vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was invariably stirred. My
father complained that I took no interest in anything, because I did not
listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might
follow the visit of King Theo-dosius, at that moment in France as
the nation's guest and (it was hinted) ally. And yet