In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [307]
“But aren’t you even some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.”
“Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, and my grandmother comes from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of wisdom were somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t intermarried since Louis XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather distant.”
“Really, how interesting; I never knew that,” said the General.
“However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe, was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles, and as we ourselves are in a direct line of descent . . .”
There was at Combray a Rue de Saintrailles to which I had never given another thought. It led from the Rue de la Bretonnerie to the Rue de l’Oiseau. And as Saintrailles, the companion of Joan of Arc, had, by marrying a Guermantes, brought into the family that county of Combray, his arms were quartered with those of Guermantes at the base of one of the windows in Saint-Hilaire. I saw again a vision of dark sandstone steps, while a modulation of sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from that in which it simply meant the genial hosts with whom I was dining this evening. If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles had just opened up. I felt that it would be useless to explain all this, and indeed a little while earlier I had lied by implication in not answering when M. de Guermantes said to me: “You don’t know our little corner?” Perhaps he was quite well aware that I did know it, and it was only from good breeding that he did not press the question. Mme de Guermantes drew me out of my meditation.
“Really, I find all that sort of thing too deadly. I say, it’s not always as boring as this at my house. I hope you’ll soon come and dine again as a compensation, with no pedigrees next time,” she said to me in a low voice, incapable both of appreciating the kind of charm which I might find in her house and of having sufficient humility to be content to appeal to me simply as a herbarium filled with plants of another day.
What Mme de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my expectations was on the contrary what in the end—for the Duke and the General went on to discuss pedigrees now without stopping—saved my evening from being a complete disappointment. How could I have felt otherwise until now? Each of my fellow-guests at dinner, decking out the mysterious name under which I had merely known and dreamed of them at a distance in a body and a mind similar or inferior to those of all the people I knew, had given me the impression of a commonplace dullness which the view on entering the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of Hamlet. No doubt these geographical regions and that