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“Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!” cried M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer’s View of Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a self-complacent tone, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen: “If it’s to be seen, I saw it!”

“What? You’ve been to Holland, and you never visited Haarlem!” cried the Duchess. “Why, even if you had only a quarter of an hour to spend in the place, they’re an extraordinary thing to have seen, those Halses. I don’t mind saying that a person who only caught a passing glimpse of them from the top of a tram without stopping, supposing they were hung out to view in the street, would open his eyes pretty wide.”

This remark shocked me as indicating a misconception of the way in which artistic impressions are formed in our minds, and because it seemed to imply that our eye is in that case simply a recording machine which takes snapshots.

M. de Guermantes, rejoicing that she should be speaking to me with so competent a knowledge of the subjects that interested me, appraised his wife’s illustrious presence, listened to what she was saying about Franz Hals, and thought: “She’s thoroughly at home in everything. Our young friend can go home and say that he’s had before his eyes a great lady of the old school, in the full sense of the word, the like of whom couldn’t be found anywhere else today.” Thus I beheld the pair of them, divorced from that name Guermantes in which long ago I had imagined them leading an unimaginable life, now just like other men and other women, merely lagging a little behind their contemporaries, and that not evenly, as in so many households of the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the wife has had the good taste to stop at the golden, the husband the misfortune to come down to the pinchbeck age of the past, she remaining still Louis XV while her partner is pompously Louis-Philippe. That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment; it was now, by a natural reaction, and with the help of so many good wines, almost a miracle. A Don John of Austria, an Isabella d’Este, situated for us in the world of names, have as little communication with the great pages of history as the Méséglise way had with the Guermantes. Isabella d’Este was no doubt in reality a very minor princess, similar to those who under Louis XIV obtained no special place at Court. But because she seems to us to be of a unique and therefore incomparable essence, we cannot conceive of her as being any less great than he, so that a supper-party with Louis XIV would appear to us only to be rather interesting, whereas with Isabella d’Este we should find ourselves miraculously transported into the presence of a heroine of romance. Then, after having studied Isabella d’Este, after having transplanted her patiently from that magic world into the world of history, and discovered that her life, her thought, contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness which had been suggested to us by her name, once we have recovered from our disappointment we feel a boundless gratitude to that princess for having had a knowledge of Mantegna’s paintings almost equal to that, hitherto despised by us and put, as Françoise would have said, “lower than the dirt,” of M. Lafenestre. After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Franz Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, in order to visualise the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of its place-names and its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through a screen of giant aloes or manchineels, inhabitants who