ly ironical.

Altogether, my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony. Since she was
of the opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations, she
thought it only right and proper that he should never come to see us in
summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden,
and that from each of his visits to Italy he should bring back some
photographs of old masters for me.

It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send to him whenever we wanted
a 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