(This reminded me that he had
constantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept
out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had become
to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann; as the
ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different from the
ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, which I utilised
not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new,
another person; still I attached him by an artificial thread, secondary
and transversal, to our former guest; and as nothing had any longer any
value for me save in the extent to which my love might profit by it, it
was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them
from my memory that I recaptured the years in which, in the eyes of this
same Swann who was at this moment before me in the Champs-Elysees, and to
whom, fortunately, Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so
often, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous by sending to ask Mamma to
come upstairs to my room to say good-night to me, while she was drinking
coffee with him and my father and my grandparents at the table in the
garden.
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