In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [147]
“But, my darling boy, you know perfectly well,” said his mother. “She’s Vermandois’s sister. It was she who gave you that nice billiard table you liked so much.”
“What, she’s Vermandois’s sister, I had no idea. Really, my family are amazing,” he went on, half-turning towards me and unconsciously adopting Bloch’s intonation just as he borrowed his ideas, “they know the most unheard-of people, people called Saint-Ferréol” (emphasising the final consonant of each word) “or something like that; my family go to balls, they drive in victorias, they lead a fabulous existence. It’s prodigious.”
Mme de Guermantes made a slight, short, sharp sound in her throat as of an involuntary laugh choked back, which was intended to show that she acknowledged her nephew’s wit to the degree which kinship demanded. A servant came in to say that the Prince von Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen sent word to M. de Norpois that he had arrived.
“Go and fetch him, Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to the ex-Ambassador, who set off in quest of the German Prime Minister.
“Wait, Monsieur. Do you think I ought to show him the miniature of the Empress Charlotte?”
“Why, I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the Ambassador in a tone of conviction, as though he envied the fortunate Minister the favour that was in store for him.
“Oh, I know he’s very sound,” said Mme de Marsantes, “and that is so rare among foreigners. But I’ve found out all about him. He’s anti-semitism personified.”
The Prince’s name preserved, in the boldness with which its opening syllables were—to borrow an expression from music—attacked, and in the stammering repetition that scanned them, the energy, the mannered simplicity, the heavy refinements of the Teutonic race, projected like green boughs over the “Heim” of dark blue enamel which glowed with the mystic light of a Rhenish window behind the pale and finely wrought gildings of the German eighteenth century. This name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German watering-place to which as a small child I had gone with my grandmother, under a mountain honoured by the feet of Goethe, from the vineyards of which we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names like the epithets which Homer applies to his heroes. And so, scarcely had I heard it spoken than, before I had recalled the watering-place, the Prince’s name seemed to shrink, to become imbued with humanity, to find large enough for itself a little place in my memory to which it clung, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetising, light, with something about it that was authorised, prescribed. Furthermore, M. de Guermantes, in explaining who the Prince was, quoted a number of his titles, and I recognised the name of a village traversed by a river on which, every evening, the cure finished for the day, I used to go boating amid the mosquitoes, and that of a forest far enough away for the doctor not to allow me to make the excursion to it. And indeed it was comprehensible that the suzerainty of the noble gentleman should extend to the surrounding places and associate afresh in the enumeration of his titles the names which one could read side by side on a map. Thus beneath the visor of the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Knight of Franconia it was the face of a beloved, smiling land, on which the rays of the evening sun had often lingered for me, that I saw, at any rate before the Prince, Rhinegrave and Elector Palatine, had entered the room. For I speedily learned that the revenues which he drew from the forest and the river peopled with gnomes and undines, and from the magic mountain on which rose the ancient Burg that still cherished memories of Luther and Louis the German, he employed in keeping five Charron motor-cars, a house in Paris and another in London, a box on Mondays at the Opéra and another for the “Tuesdays” at the “Français.” He did not seem to me to be—nor did he himself seem to believe that he was—different from other men of similar