itness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the
family of some old friends of his parents; some of whom had 'kept up'
with him, like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had
invited him to my mother's wedding, while others barely knew him by
sight, but were, they thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the
son, to the worthy successor of the late M. Swann.

But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of
them, the people of fashion, in a certain sense, were also a part of his
house, his service, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon
his brilliant connections, the same external support, the same solid
comfort as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the
fine table-linen which had come down to him from his forebears. And the
thought that, if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the
house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would
be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg
and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old
Francoise derived from the knowledge that she would, one day, be buried
in her own fine clothes, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so
exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and
patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which
in her mind's eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually
of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of
all,--since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference
to Odette, Swann was constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed
feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but at least less welcome
to her than anyone, even the most wearisome of the Verdurins'
'faithful,'--when he betook himself to a world in which he was the
paramount example of taste, a man whom no pains were spared to attract,
whom people were genuinely sorry not to see, he began once again to
believe in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite
for it, as an invalid may feel who has been in bed for months and on a
strict diet, when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an
official banquet or the advertisement of a cruise round Sicily.

If he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not
paying them visits, it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her
that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He still pa