d drank, or the
shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And in the small extent to which
this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which
Swann was tasting was that he could emigrate for a moment into those few
and distant parts of himself which had remained almost foreign to his
love and to his pain. In this respect the personality, with which my
great-aunt endowed him, of 'young Swann,' as distinct from the more
individual personality of Charles Swann, was that in which he now most
delighted. Once when, because it was the birthday of the Princesse de
Parme (and because she could often be of use, indirectly, to Odette,
by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and all that sort of
thing), he had decided to send her a basket of fruit, and was not quite
sure where or how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of
his mother who, delighted to be doing a commission for him, had written
to him, laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit
at the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they
were, the straw berries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always
had the best, am soon, "every fruit visited and examined, one by one,
by myself." And ii the sequel, by the cordiality with which the
Princess thanked him, hi had been able to judge of the flavour of the
strawberries and of the ripe ness of the pears. But, most of all, that
"every fruit visited and examinee one by one, by myself" had brought
balm to his sufferings by carrying hi mind off to a region which he
rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich
and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from
generation to generation the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art
of ordering things from shops.

Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was 'young Swann' not to
feel, when he assumed that part again for a moment, a keener pleasure
than he was capable of feeling at other times--when, indeed, he was
grown sick of pleasure; and if the friendliness of the middle-class
people, for whom he had never been anything else than 'young Swann,' was
less animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flattering, for
all that, since in the middle-class mind friendship is inseparable from
respect), no letter from a Royal Personage, offering him some princely
entertainment, could ever be so attractive to Swann as the letter which
asked him to be a w