In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [195]
“How are you? Let me introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes,” Mme de Villeparisis said to me, while the stranger, without looking at me, muttering a vague “Charmed!” which he followed with a “H’m, h’m, h’m,” to make his affability seem somehow forced, and crooking his little finger, forefinger and thumb, held out to me his middle and ring fingers, destitute of rings, which I clasped through his suede glove; then, without lifting his eyes to my face, he turned towards Mme de Villeparisis.
“Good gracious, I shall be forgetting my own name next!” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Here am I calling you Baron de Guermantes. Let me introduce the Baron de Charlus. But after all, it’s not a very serious mistake,” she went on, “for you’re a thorough Guermantes all the same.”
By this time my grandmother had reappeared, and we all set out together. Saint-Loup’s uncle declined to honour me not only with a word but with so much as a look in my direction. If he stared strangers out of countenance (and during this short excursion he two or three times hurled his terrible and searching scrutiny like a sounding-lead at insignificant people of the most humble extraction who happened to pass), on the other hand he never for a moment, if I was to judge by myself, looked at persons whom he knew—as a detective on a secret mission might except his personal friends from his professional vigilance. Leaving my grandmother, Mme de Villeparisis and him to talk to one another, I fell behind with Saint-Loup.
“Tell me, am I right in thinking I heard Mme de Villeparisis say just now to your uncle that he was a Guermantes?”
“Of course he is: Palamède de Guermantes.”
“Not the same Guermantes who have a place near Combray, and claim descent from Geneviève de Brabant?”
“Most certainly: my uncle, who is the very last word in heraldry and all that sort of thing, would tell you that our ‘cry,’ our war-cry, that is to say, which was changed afterwards to ‘Passavant,’ was originally ‘Combraysis,’ ” he said, smiling so as not to appear to be priding himself on this prerogative of a “cry,” which only the quasi-royal houses, the great chiefs of feudal bands, enjoyed. “It’s his brother who has the place now.”
So she was related, and very closely, to the Guermantes, this Mme de Villeparisis who had for so long been for me the lady who had given me a duck filled with chocolates when I was small, more remote then from the Guermantes way than if she had been shut up somewhere on the Méséglise way, less brilliant, less highly placed by me than was the Combray optician, and who now suddenly went through one of those fantastic rises in value, parallel to the no less unforeseen depreciations of other objects in our possession, which—rise and fall alike—introduce in our youth, and in those periods of our life in which a trace of youth persists, changes as numerous as the Metamorphoses of Ovid.*
“Haven’t they got the busts of all the old lords of Guermantes down there?”
“Yes, and a lovely sight they are!” Saint-Loup was ironical. “Between you and me, I look on all that sort of thing as rather a joke. But what they have got at Guermantes, which is a little more interesting, is quite a touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière. It’s as fine as Whistler or Velasquez,” went on Saint-Loup, who in his neophyte zeal was not always very exact about degrees of greatness. “There are also some stunning pictures by Gustave Moreau. My aunt is the niece of your friend Mme de Villeparisis; she was brought up by her, and married her cousin, who was a nephew, too, of my aunt Villeparisis, the present Duc de Guermantes.”
“Then what is your uncle?”
“He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Strictly, when my great-uncle died, my uncle Palamède ought to have taken the title of Prince des Laumes, which was that of his brother before he became Duc