Swann

Swann, Charles. A central figure in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, in which he acts as a kind of alter ego for the narrator, notably in his love for Odette de Crécy, recounted in Un amour de Swann. A member of fashionable society and connoisseur of the arts, he suffers as a Jew during the Dreyfus Affair. Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette, is the object of the narrator's youthful affections, but marries his friend Saint-Loup.