the cheeks was blemished, all of which may be seen in the portraits of that family which have come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as I was no longer in love with the Duchess, her reincarnation in the person of a young man offered me no attraction. I interpreted the hook made by the Duc de Châtellerault’s nose as if it had been the signature of a painter whose work I had long studied but who no longer interested me in the least. Next, I said good evening also to the Prince de Foix, and to the detriment of my knuckles, which emerged crushed and mangled, let them be caught in the vice of a German handclasp, accompanied by an ironical or good-natured smile, from the Prince von Faffenheim, M. de Norpois’s friend, who, by virtue of the craze for nicknames which prevailed in this circle, was known so universally as Prince Von that he himself used to sign his letters “Prince Von,” or, when he wrote to his intimates, “Von.” At least this abbreviation was understandable, in view of his triple-barrelled name. It was less easy to grasp the reasons which caused “Elizabeth” to be replaced, now by “Lili,” now by “Bebeth,” just as another world swarmed with “Kikis.” One can understand how people, idle and frivolous though they in general were, should have come to adopt “Quiou” in order not to waste the precious time that it would have taken them to pronounce “Montesquiou.” But it is less easy to see what they gained by nicknaming one of their cousins “Dinand” instead of “Ferdinand.” It must not be thought, however, that in the invention of nicknames the Guermantes invariably proceeded by curtailing or duplicating syllables. Thus two sisters, the Comtesse de Montpeyroux and the Vicomtesse de Vélude, who were both of them enormously stout, invariably heard themselves addressed, without the least trace of annoyance on their part or of amusement on other people’s, so long established was the custom, as “Petite” and “Mignonne.” Mme de Guermantes, who adored Mme de Montpeyroux, would, if the latter had fallen seriously ill, have flown to the sister with tears in her eyes and exclaimed: “I hear Petite is dreadfully bad!” Mme de l’Eclin, who wore her hair in bands that entirely hid her ears, was never called anything but “Hungry belly.”23 In some cases people simply added an “a” to the surname or Christian name of the husband to designate the wife. The most miserly, most sordid, most inhuman man in the Faubourg having been christened Raphael, his charmer, his flower springing also from the rock, always signed herself “Raphaela.” But these are merely a few specimens of countless rules to which we can always return later on if the occasion arises, and explain some of them.
I then asked the Duke to introduce me to the Prince d’Agrigente. “What! do you mean to say you don’t know the good Gri-gri!” exclaimed M. de Guermantes, and gave M. d’Agrigente my name. His own, so often quoted by Françoise, had always appeared to me like a transparent sheet of coloured glass through which I beheld, struck by the slanting rays of a golden sun, on the shore of the violet sea, the pink marble cubes of an ancient city of which I had not the least doubt that the Prince—who happened by some brief miracle to be passing through Paris—was himself, as luminously Sicilian and as gloriously weathered, the absolute sovereign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was introduced, and who wheeled round to bid me good evening with a ponderous nonchalance which he considered elegant, was as independent of his name as of a work of art that he owned without betraying in his person any reflexion of it, without, perhaps, ever having looked at it. The Prince d’Agrigente was so entirely devoid of anything princely, anything remotely reminiscent of Agrigento, that one was led to suppose that his name, entirely distinct from himself, bound by no ties to his person, had had the power of attracting to itself every iota of vague poetry that there might have been in this man, as in any other, and enclosing it, after this operation, in the enchanted syllables. If