In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [13]
Despite the arrogant air of their butler, Françoise had been in a position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes occupied their mansion by virtue not of an immemorial right but of a quite recent tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked on the side that I did not know was quite small and just like all the neighbouring gardens, and I realised at last that there were not to be seen there pit and gallows or fortified mill, secret chamber, pillared dovecote, manorial bakehouse, tithe-barn or fortress, drawbridge or fixed bridge or even flying or toll bridge, charters, muniments, ramparts or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when the bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of salt water distributed over the earth’s surface, had suddenly restored to it a personality of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal painted by Whistler in his Harmonies in Blue and Silver, so the name Guermantes had seen the last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables perish under Françoise’s blows, when one day an old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess: “She has the highest position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; hers is the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” No doubt the most exclusive drawing-room, the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was little or nothing after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed. And yet this one too (and it was to be the last of the series), however humble it was, possessed something, quite apart from its material components, that amounted to an obscure differentiation.
And it became all the more essential that I should be able to explore in the “salon” of Mme de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery of her name, since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage. Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks that were irreducible to, impervious to the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, taking the place of my shattered dream, like a swan or a willow into which a god or nymph has been changed, and which henceforward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be shaken by the wind. And yet scarcely had I left her presence than those glittering fragments had reassembled like the green and roseate reflexions of the sunset behind the oar that has broken them, and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had quickly appropriated to itself my impression of the face. But now, frequently, I saw her at her window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least, if I did not succeed in integrating into the living woman the name Guermantes, in thinking of her as Mme de Guermantes, I could cast the blame on the impotence of my mind to carry through the act that I demanded of it; but she herself, our neighbour, seemed to commit the same error, commit it without discomfiture moreover, without any of my scruples, without even suspecting that it was an error. Thus Mme de Guermantes showed in her dresses the same anxiety to follow the fashion as if, believing herself to have become a woman like any other, she had aspired to that elegance in her attire in which ordinary women might equal and perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in the street gaze admiringly at a well-dressed actress; and in the morning, before she sallied forth on foot, as if the opinion of the passers-by, whose vulgarity she accentuated by parading familiarly through their midst her inaccessible life, could be a tribunal competent to judge her, I would see her in front of the glass playing, with a conviction free from all pretence or irony, with passion, with ill-humour, with conceit, like