uctural Paris a
certain house, on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and made its
windows precious. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as
my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swann lived as one
that closely resembled the other houses built at the same period in the
neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann's family seemed to them to be in the
same category as many other families of stockbrokers. Their judgment was
more or less favourable according to the extent to which the family in
question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe,
and there was about it nothing that they could call unique. What, on the
other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found in equal, if
not in greater measure elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house
was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house
that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of
financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they
had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was a mistake
which was very soon corrected. For in order to distinguish in all
Gilberte's surroundings an indefinable quality analogous, in the scale
of emotions, to what in the scale of colours is called infra-red, a
supplementary sense of perception was required, with which love, for the
time being, had endowed me; and this my parents lacked.

On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to
the Champs-Elysees, I would try to arrange my walks so that I should
be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead
Francoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making
her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess
with regard to Mme. Swann. "It seems, she puts great faith in medals.
She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an
owl hoot, or the death-watch in the wall, or if she had seen a cat
at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she's a most
religious lady, she is!" I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if,
on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my
emotion would bring me to a standstill, I would fasten on his white
whiskers eyes that melted with passion. And Francoise would rouse me
with: "What's wrong with you now, child?" and we would continue on our
way until we reached their gate, where a porter, different from every
o