to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to
follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in
the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent
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 house of Bouillon, this lady had said to her:

"I think you know M. Swann very well; he is a great friend of my
nephews, the des Laumes."

My grandmother had returned from the call full of pr