In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [308]
And these old-time prejudices restored in a flash to the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry. Assuredly, the notions in the possession of the nobility which make them the scholars, the etymologists of the language not of words but of names (and even then only in comparison with the ignorant mass of the middle classes, for if at the same level of mediocrity a devout Catholic would be better able to stand questioning on the details of the liturgy than a free-thinker, on the other hand an anti-clerical archaeologist can often give points to his parish priest on everything connected even with the latter’s own church), those notions, if we are to keep to the truth, that is to say to the spirit, did not even have for these noblemen the charm that they would have had for a bourgeois. They knew perhaps better than I that the Duchesse de Guise was Princess of Cleves, of Orléans, of Porcien, and all the rest, but they had known, long before they knew all these names, the face of the Duchesse de Guise which thenceforth that name reflected back to them. I had begun with the fairy, even if she was fated soon to perish; they with the woman.
In middle-class families one sometimes sees jealousies spring up if the younger sister marries before the elder. So the aristocratic world, Courvoisiers especially but Guermantes also, reduced its ennobled greatness to simple domestic superiorities, by virtue of a childishness which I had met originally (and this for me was its sole charm) in books. Is it not just as though Tallemant des Réaux were speaking of the Guermantes, and not of the Rohans, when he relates with evident satisfaction how M. de Guéménée cried to his brother: “You can come in here; this is not the Louvre!” and said of the Chevalier de Rohan (because he was a natural son of the Duc de Clermont): “At any rate he’s a prince.” The only thing that distressed me in all this talk was to find that the absurd stories which were being circulated about the charming adopted Grand Duke of Luxembourg found as much credence in this salon as they had among Saint-Loup’s friends. Plainly it was an epidemic that would not last longer than perhaps a year or two but had meanwhile infected everyone. People repeated the same old stories, or enriched them with others equally untrue. I gathered that the Princesse de Luxembourg herself, while apparently defending her nephew, supplied weapons for the assault. “You are wrong to stand up for him,” M. de Guermantes told me, as Saint-Loup had told me before. “Look, even leaving aside the opinion of our family, which is unanimous, you have only to talk to his servants, and they, after all, are the people who know us best. Mme de Luxembourg gave her little negro page to her nephew. The negro came back in tears: ‘Grand Duke beat me, me no bad boy, Grand Duke naughty man, just fancy!’ And I can speak with some knowledge, he’s Oriane’s cousin.”
I cannot, by the way, say how many times in the course of this evening I heard the word “cousin” used. On the one hand, M. de Guermantes, almost at every name that was mentioned, exclaimed: “But he’s Oriane’s cousin!” with the sudden delight of a man who, lost in a forest, reads at the ends of a pair of arrows pointing in opposite directions on a signpost, and followed by quite a low number of kilometres, the words: “Belvédère Casimir-Périer” and “Croix du Grand-Veneur,” and gathers from them that he is on the right road. On the other hand the word cousin was employed in a wholly different connexion (which was here the exception to the prevailing rule) by the Turkish Ambassadress, who had come in after dinner. Devoured by social ambition and endowed with a real power of assimilating knowledge, she would pick up with equal facility Xenophon