• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

So Mme de Villeparisis, who when I used to hear my grandmother talking about her in my childhood had seemed to me to be an old lady of the same sort as her other friends and had always remained so to me—that person who had once given me a box of chocolates held by a duck and was now going out of her way to be agreeable to us—was a member of the powerful Guermantes clan! This change in the value of what we possess, like those old bundles which turn out to be priceless treasures, is one of the things that introduce most wonder, animation, variety and consequently poetry into one’s adolescence (that adolescence which, while gradually dwindling until it becomes no more than a thin trickle that often runs dry, is sometimes prolonged throughout the whole course of one’s life). The rise or depreciation of one’s wealth, the weirdly unexpected reassessments of one’s possessions, the misrepresentations of people we know, which make one’s youth as fabulous as the metamorphoses of Ovid or even the metempsychoses of the Hindus, derive in part from ignorance—an ignorance that extends to people’s names as to everything else. My great-aunt had bought for one of the rooms at Combray some crude painted canvases (perhaps indeed they were only coloured paper) framed in coffee-coloured wood, which represented scenes by Teniers. I had told Bloch in perfectly good faith that we had a room full of Teniers. In the vague world, innocent of any notion of discrimination, that painting was to me then, I could see no difference between a five-franc reproduction and an original work. Similarly in the Army, where one has a captain called Lévy and another called Lévy-Mirepoix: these two names, though the second is longer than the first and therefore a little more ridiculous, appear otherwise interchangeable. When one is a child, certain words placed in front of a name seem funny, except M. l’abbé which is respectable; but if Mme Galopin is called Marie-Euphrosine Galopin, or Mme de Villeparisis the Marquise de Villeparisis, this merely adds something rather heteroclite to persons otherwise of the same ilk. For one starts from the impressions one has received, and not from the preconceptions whereby an educated man knows what a painting is, and a man of the world what the Villeparisis are. People have only to present themselves to our eyes in a particularly simple light—which happens especially often with elegant people, like Swann who pushed the piano for my great-aunt and sent her strawberries, or Mme de Villeparisis who had given me a chocolate duck—while being otherwise indistinguishable from the other modest supernumeraries on the family stage, and they will seem to us if anything of a slightly inferior rank. One fine day we are amazed to hear someone we place very high, someone to whose level we seek to aspire, speak of them as people far superior to himself. Thus to ignorance is added, further to mislead us, the homogeneity in one’s memory of impressions belonging to the same category, and their heterogeneousness in relation to impressions of another category. This heterogeneousness, in effect, makes it far more difficult for us to calculate value. In order to compare, to subtract, it is first of all necessary to reduce to qualities of the same kind. Those who start from preconceived notions can do so. Childhood, enclosed in its impressions, cannot. Mme de Villeparisis, an old family acquaintance, less brilliant and intimidating than the optician, was further removed from “the Guermantes way” than if she had been confined to “the Méséglise way.” But these differences in kind, if they make the assessment of values impossible, are great sources of poetry (all the more so because those beliefs of our youth, like forces that need room in which to deploy, operate over the great, wide surfaces of time that stretch behind us). When we discover that the easy-going captain whom we treated with less respect than Captain Lévy, and who—not content with being nice to us every day—asked