In reality from the point of view of society Swann was not such a
self-made man as I appear to be saying, and Madame Swann his mother, a most
distinguished woman, had enjoyed several brilliant female friendships in her
lifetime. Madame Swann had certainly not sought out these friendships. She
simply yielded to the solicitations of elegant women who, seduced by her
intelligence and charm, used everything in their powers to attract her. But this
initial ascent - that her son came to perfect so brilliantly - into a different
world, even if Madame Swann did not premeditate it, perhaps, it must be
repeated, she would have been incapable of accomplishing had she not been
Jewish, that is to say more recently middle-class than the wives of her
husband's colleagues, not yet weighed down by the dead weight of prejudice and
secular routine, that would no longer have allowed her the elasticity, the
mobility that a change of social sphere demands. She rose, like a light and
glistening bubble that silently ascends in the midst of the molecules of a
liquid whose cohesion at most grants only motionlessness. Recently arrived from
the Orient (her family had only lived in France for five or six generations) she
still had that restlessness, that taste for the new, that suppleness of the
organism that can give itself up to what it wants, thanks to which a traveller
only just arrived in a new country, undertakes an excursion such as he would not
have had the strength, the taste for nor even the very idea of undertaking in
the place he lived and during the course of his usual habits. These several
brilliant friendships that elevated her position and the decoy signals to which the
other women of the same social class would no doubt have opposed (just as much as if
she had addressed them from the far reaches of the planet Mars) by an
articular stiffness, a physiological, statistical, astronomical non possumus,
drawn from their submission to the laws of gravity that did not allow them to
feel an attraction other than in the inverse ratio to the square of their
distance and on condition that they had been successful in their "world", Madame Swann, who
had no vanity whatsoever, naively concealed these brilliant friendships from her
whole circle of solicitors' and brokers' wives, by grace of the innocent and natural performance of her distinction and her delicacy. If on a visit to Madame
Swann's my great-aunt encountered a woman unknown to the world of finance,
Madame Swann out of friendship for my aunt left the other lady a little to one
side who could not take this neglect for disdain and occupied herself
exclusively with my aunt who, interpreting Madame Swann's attitude with her less
noble nature and her less refined notions of politeness told herself that from
the moment Madame Swann deserted that lady for her, it was because she must have
been some obscure Semite small-fry. And if one were to see several carriages
blazoned with imperial
crowns stationed in front of the Swann's mansion, one would have told oneself
that Monsieur Swann's professional position put him in connection with a lot of
people whose wives would certainly not want to rub shoulders with his, but who
might find it more convenient to come and speak to him at his own home rather
than in the "office". If my great-aunt's eye-glasses had not been able to take
note of the nimble alteration that had been produced in Madame Swann's situation
in the world, for an even more powerful reason she had suspected nothing in the
complete revolution carried out by her son whom she saw only rarely, and always
with a politeness and an earnestness that she judged in general to be
sufficiently characteristic of a mediocre social position not to find them a
trifle naive amongst the sons of people so well "placed". Moreover, as for
Madame Swann, if she was in all sincerity much happier at her son's success in
archaeology and botany than in his social successes, she also politically, in the
role of their son's plenipotentiary among the different foreign powers that all
mothers play at any given moment, sought rather when, on her "day" she spoke of
him to the wives of attorneys and brokers, to exaggerate his genuine taste for
solitude and study, his unsociableness, to forestall the susceptibilities of the
people with whom he did not keep company.
And if now several years after the deaths of Monsieur and Madame Swann, my
great-aunt had been told that their son, who she considered rather as
imperceptibly fallen from his lofty position on account of his strange tastes
and excessive moral simplicity, the so-called "noble middle-class" which was
that of his parents, that this Swann who as the "young Swann" was perfectly
qualified to "rub along" with the most esteemed solicitors and attorneys in
Paris [...]
Manuscript fragment from Cahier 9, NAF 16649. Reproduced in Littérature No 70, 1988, p110-128, Brouillons et brouillages, Proust et l'antisémitisme, Bernard Brun.
Created 23.11.15