And he was most eager when the fair unknown was in humble circumstances.
Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is
afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by
boors and 'bounders' that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social
value underrated. Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the
social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people
whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at
inferiors. And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when
with a duchess, would tremble^ for fear of being despised, and would
instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace's maid.
Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a
resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur
to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the
stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them above
and below that point, that degree in life in which they will remain fixed
until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as
pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre distractions, that just
not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there with them; Swann would
endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must pass
time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be
beautiful and charming.
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