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By Root 1891 0

Guermantes complexion, the Guermantes hair, they spoke also of the Guermantes wit, as of the wit of the Mortemarts), a certain social quality whose superior refinement—pre-Louis XIV—was all the more universally recognised because they promulgated it themselves—all this meant that in the actual substance, however precious it might be, of the aristocratic society in which they were to be found embedded here and there, the Guermantes remained recognisable, easy to detect and to follow, like the veins whose paleness streaks a block of jasper or onyx, or, better still, like the supple undulation of those tresses of light whose loosened hairs run like flexible rays along the sides of a moss-agate.

The Guermantes—those at least who were worthy of the name—were not only endowed with an exquisite quality of flesh, of hair, of transparency of gaze, but had a way of holding themselves, of walking, of bowing, of looking at one before they shook one’s hand, of shaking hands, which made them as different in all these respects from an ordinary member of fashionable society as he in turn was from a peasant in a smock. And despite their affability one asked oneself: “Have they not indeed the right, though they waive it, when they see us walk, bow, leave a room, do any of those things which when performed by them become as graceful as the flight of a swallow or the droop of a rose on its stem, to think: ‘These people are of a different breed from us, and we are the lords of creation’?” Later on, I realised that the Guermantes did indeed regard me as being of a different breed, but one that aroused their envy because I possessed merits unknown to myself which they professed to prize above all others. Later still I came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere and that in them scorn or amazement could co-exist with admiration and envy. The physical flexibility peculiar to the Guermantes was twofold: on the one hand always in action, at every moment, so that if, for example, a male Guermantes were about to salute a lady, he produced a silhouette of himself formed from the tension between a series of asymmetrical and energetically compensated movements, one leg dragging a little, either on purpose or because, having been broken so often in the hunting-field, it imparted to his trunk in its effort to keep pace with the other a curvature to which the upward thrust of one shoulder gave a counterpoise, while the monocle was inserted in the eye and raised an eyebrow just as the tuft of hair on the forehead flopped downward in the formal bow; on the other hand, like the shape which wave or wind or wake have permanently imprinted on a shell or a boat, this flexibility was so to speak stylised into a sort of fixed mobility, curving the arched nose which, beneath the blue, protruding eyes, above the thin lips from which, in the women, there emerged a husky voice, recalled the fabulous origin attributed in the sixteenth century by the complaisance of parasitic and Hellenising genealogists to this race, ancient beyond dispute, but not to the extent which they claimed when they gave as its source the mythological impregnation of a nymph by a divine Bird.

The Guermantes were no less idiosyncratic from the intellectual than from the physical point of view. With the exception of Prince Gilbert, the husband of “Marie-Gilbert” with the antiquated ideas, who made his wife sit on his left when they drove out together because her blood, though royal, was inferior to his own (but he was an exception and a perpetual laughing-stock, behind his back, to the rest of his family, for whom he provided an endless source of fresh anecdotes), the Guermantes, while living among the cream of the aristocracy, affected to set no store by nobility. The theories of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, it must be said, by virtue of being a Guermantes, had become to a certain extent something different and more attractive, put intelligence so much above everything else and were in politics so socialistic that one wondered where in her mansion could be the hiding-place