Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com. This episode is brought to you by a basket of raspberries. Tonight we'll read Mesier Swan, the next part in our series from French writer Marseille Proust's monumental in search of lost Time, which is seven volumes long and first published in 1913. In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's recollections and experiences in the late 19th century and early 20th century, high society France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world. This series does not necessarily need to be followed in order, as rather than being plot-driven, it is more of a meditation on memories, consciousness and ambiance. The first episode aired on May 9, 2022 and is titled Overcher. The second episode, the Magic Lantern, aired on Julyth, 2022. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now take a few deep breaths. For many years, albeit, and especially before his marriage, Mesieurs Swan, the younger, came often to see my family at Combre. My great aunt and grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society which his family had frequented. Or that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swan gave him among us, they were harboring with the complete innocence of a family of honest in-keepers who have in their midst some distinguished highwaymen and never know it. One of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world. Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swan was playing in the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion. But also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and nothing except the chance of a brilliant career or of a good marriage could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior cast. As your swan, the father had been a stalk-broker, and so young swan found himself immured for life in a cast where one's fortune, as in a list of taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income. We knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew his own associates, the people with whom he was in a position to mix. If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old friends of the family, like my relatives, shut their eyes all the more good naturetly that swan himself after he was left and orphaned, still came most faithfully to see us. But we would have been ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance, whom one knew, were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat, had he met them while he was walking with ourselves. Had there been such a thing as a determination to apply to Swan, a social coefficient peculiar to, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father's position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than theirs, because leading a very simple life and having always had a craze for antiques and pictures, he now lived and piled up his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit. But which stood on the Cade d'Orlion, a neighborhood in which my great aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered? Are you really a connoisseur now? She would say to him, I ask for your own sake as you are likely to have fakes palmed off on you by the dealers. For she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would avoid serious topics and showed a very dull preciseness. Not only when he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details. But even when my grandmother's sisters were talking to him about art. When challenged by them to give an opinion or to express his admiration for some picture, would remain almost impolitely silent and would then make amends by furnishing if he could. Some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung or the date at which it had been painted. But as a rule, he would content himself with trying to amuse us by telling us the story of his latest adventure, and he would have a fresh story for us on every occasion, with someone whom we ourselves knew, such as the combray chemist or our cook or our coachman. These stories certainly used to make my great aunt laugh, but she could never tell whether there was on account of the absurd parts which Swan invariably made himself play in the adventures, or of the wit that he showed in telling us of them. It is easy to see you are a regular character, Miss Yerswan. As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle, common, she would always take care to remark to strangers when Swan was mentioned, that he was the son of old Miss Yerswan, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when Miss Yer Swan called on New Year's Day, bringing her a little packet of candy chestnuts. She never failed if there were strangers in the room. say to him, well, Miss Yerswan, and do you still live next door to the bonded vaults so as to make sure not that you miss the train when you go to Lyon and she would peep out of the corner of her eye over her glasses at the other visitors. But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this swan, who in his capacity as the son of old Monsieur Swan, was fully qualified to be received by any of the upper middle class, the most respected baristas and solicitors of Paris, though he was perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into a bayance, had another almost secret existence of a wholly different kind. That, when he left our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no No sooner have turned the corner, then he would stop.

Retrace his step. saying that he must go home to bed. He would no sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retraces steps, and be off to some drawing room on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had ever sat eyes. It would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy with our stales of knowing that he would when he had finished his conversation with her.

Plunge deep into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms or to be content with an image more likely to have occurred to her. For she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combre. As the thought of having had to dinner, Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures. One day, when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had begged pardon for being an evening close, Francois, when he had gone, told us that she had got it from his coachmen that he had been dining with a princess,

a pretty sort of princess drawled my aunt, I know them, and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting, serenely ironical. Altogether, my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony. Since she was of the opinion that he ought to fill flattered by our invitations, she thought it only right and proper, that he should never come to see us in summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden. And that from each of his visits to Italy he should bring back some photographs of old masters for me. It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send to him whenever we wanted a recipe for some special sauce, or for a pineapple salad for one of our big dinner parties, to which he himself would not be invited, not seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who might be in our house for the first time. If the conversation turned upon the princes of the house of France, gentlemen, you and I will never know will we and don't want to do we. My great aunt would say tartly to Swan, who had perhaps a letter from Twickenham in his pocket. She would make him play accompaniment and turn over music on evenings when my grandmother's sister sang. Manipulating this creature so rare and refined at other times and in other places, with the rough simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no more carefully than if it were a penny toy. certainly the swan who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days, differed hugely from the swan created in my great aunt's mind when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combre, after the two shy peels had sounded from the gate. She would vitalize. By injecting into it everything she had ever heard about the swan family, The fake and unrecognizable shape which began to appear with my grandmother in its wake against a background of shadows, and could it last be identified by the sound of its voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account book or the record of a

will. Our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. the simple act which we describe as seeing someone we know is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about them, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks to follow so exactly the line of his nose. They blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more then a transparent envelope. So that each time we see the face, or hear the voice, it is our own ideas of Him which we recognize and to which we listen. And so no doubt from the swan they had built up from their own purposes, my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion. Details by means of which other people, when they met

him, saw all the graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier. But they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted. A face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house. To plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half memory and half oblivion. Of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, Round the card table or in the cardin during our companionable country life. Our friends, bodily frame, had been so well lined with this sense and with various earlier memories of his family, that their own special swan had become to my people a complete and living creature. So that even now I have the feeling of leaving someone I know for another quite different person when going back in memory. I pass from the swan, whom I knew later, and more intimately, to this early swan. This early swan, in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood. And who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time. as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness. The same. So to speak, tonality. This early swan abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut tree, of baskets of raspberries, and of a sprig of tarragon. And yet, one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favor of a lady whom, because of our cast theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in spite of several common interests. This lady had said to her,

I think you know Miss Year Swan very well. He is a great friend of my nephews. My grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house which overlooked some gardens and which Madame de Fille a placee had advised her to rent a flat and also for a repairing tailor and his daughter who kept a little shop in the courtyard into which she had gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt, which she had torn on the staircase. My grandmother had found these people perfectly charming. The girl she said was a jewel and the tailor a most distinguished man, the finest she had ever seen. For in her eyes distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position. She was in ecstasy's over some answer the tailor had made, saying to mama, seven ye would not have said it better. And by way of contrast, of a nephew Of Madame, de Ville, apporise, whom she had met at the house.

My dear, he is so common. Now, the effect of that remark about Swan had been not to raise him in my great aunts' estimation, but to lower Madame Défile plecée. It appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Madame Défile plecée, imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swan's existence, and in allowing members of her family to associate with him. How should she know Swan, a lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshall McMahon? This view of Swan's social atmosphere which prevailed in my family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst class. You might almost say, a fast woman, whom to do him justice. He never attempted to introduce to us. For he continued to come to us alone, though he came more and more seldom. But from whom they thought they could establish, on the assumption that he had found her there, the circle unknown to them in which he ordinarily moved. But on one occasion, my grandfather read in a newspaper that Miss Yerswan was one of the most faithful attendance at the Sunday lunchens.

Given. Miss Yersuan was one of the most faithful attendants at the Sunday lunchens. Given by a duke whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent statesmen in the reign of Louis Philippe. Now, my grandfather was curious to learn all the little details which might help him to take a mental share in the private lives of men like Mollet, the Duke. He was delighted to find that Swan associated with people who had known them. My great aunt, however, interpreted this piece of news in a sense discreditable to Swan. for anyone who chooses his associates outside the cast in which he had been born and bred, outside his proper station, was condemned to utter degradation in her eyes. It seemed to her that such a one-abticated all claim to enjoy the fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position, which prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children's benefit. For my great aunt had actually ceased to see the son of a lawyer who had been known because he had married a highness and had thereby stepped down in her eyes from the respectable position of a lawyer's son, to that of those adventurers. Upstart footmen or stable boys, mostly, to whom we read that queens have sometimes shown their favors.

She objected, therefore, to my grandfather's plan of questioning Swan.

When next he came to dine with us, about these people whose friendship with him, we had discovered. On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters, elderly spinsters, who shared her nobility of character, but her intelligence. Declarated that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were ladies of lofty ambition, who, for that reason, were incapable of taking the least interest in what might be called the pinchback things of life, even when they had a historic value or generally speaking, in anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically precious. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their sense of hearing which had gradually come to understand its own futility when the tone of the conversation

at the dinner table became frivolous or merely mundane. Thank you. you you