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By Root 1824 0

which they nevertheless all admired but to which, by a reserve analogous to that of which Swann had given me a foretaste, no one referred. This reserve was simply a matter of good form. But for the fellow-guest, if he thought about the matter, there was something strangely melancholy about it all, and these meals in the Guermantes household were reminiscent of the hours which timid lovers often spend together in talking trivialities until it is time to part, without—whether from shyness, from modesty or from awkwardness—the great secret which they would have been happier to confess ever having succeeded in passing from their hearts to their lips. It must, however, be added that this silence with regard to deeper things which one was always waiting in vain to see broached, if it might pass as characteristic of the Duchess, was by no means absolute with her. Mme de Guermantes had spent her girlhood in a somewhat different environment, equally aristocratic but less brilliant and above all less futile than that in which she now lived, and one of wide culture. It had left beneath her present frivolity a sort of firmer bedrock, invisibly nutritious, to which indeed the Duchess would repair in search (very rarely, though, for she detested pedantry) of some quotation from Victor Hugo or Lamartine which, extremely appropriate, uttered with a look of true feeling from her fine eyes, never failed to surprise and charm her audience. Sometimes, even, unpretentiously, with pertinence and simplicity, she would give some dramatist and Academician a piece of sage advice, would make him modify a situation or alter an ending.

If, in the drawing-room of Mme de Villeparisis, as in the church at Combray on the day of Mlle Percepied’s wedding, I had difficulty in rediscovering in the handsome but too human face of Mme de Guermantes the enigma of her name, I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation, profound, mysterious, would have the strangeness of a mediaeval tapestry or a Gothic window. But in order that I should not be disappointed by the words that I should hear uttered by a person who called herself Mme de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love with her, it would not have sufficed that those words should be shrewd, beautiful and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of the closing syllable of her name, that colour which on first seeing her I had been disappointed not to find in her person and had fancied as having taken refuge in her mind. True, I had already heard Mme de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup, people whose intelligence was in no way extraordinary, pronounce quite casually this name Guermantes, simply as that of a person who was coming to see them or with whom they were going to dine, without seeming to feel that there were latent in her name the glow of yellowing woods and a whole mysterious tract of country. But this must have been an affectation on their part, as when the classic poets give us no warning of the profound intentions which they nevertheless had, an affectation which I myself also strove to imitate, saying in the most natural tone: “The Duchesse de Guermantes,” as though it were a name that was just like other names. Besides, everyone declared that she was a highly intelligent woman, a witty conversationalist, living in a small circle of most interesting people: words which became accomplices of my dream. For when they spoke of an intelligent group, of witty talk, it was in no way intelligence as I knew it that I imagined, not even that of the greatest minds; it was not at all with men like Bergotte that I peopled this group. No, by intelligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by the sun, impregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed, had she made the most intelligent remarks (in the sense in which I understood the word when it was used of a philosopher or critic), Mme de Guermantes would perhaps have disappointed even more keenly my expectation of so special a faculty than if, in the course of a trivial conversation, she had confined herself to discussing cooking