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By Root 1727 0

have gone on for ever. For M. de Guermantes went on to explain that M. d’Ornessan’s great-grandmother had been the sister of Marie de Castille Montjeu, the wife of Timoléon de Lorraine, and consequently Oriane’s aunt, with the result that the conversation drifted back to genealogies, while the imbecile Turkish Ambassadress breathed in my ear: “You appear to be very much in the Duke’s good books; have a care!” and, on my demanding an explanation: “I mean to say—verb. sap.—he’s a man to whom one could safely entrust one’s daughter, but not one’s son.” Now if ever, on the contrary, there was a man who was passionately and exclusively a lover of women, it was certainly the Duc de Guermantes. But error, untruth fatuously believed, were for the Ambassadress like a vital element out of which she could not move. “His brother Mémé, who is, as it happens, for other reasons altogether” (he ignored her) “profoundly uncongenial to me, is genuinely distressed by the Duke’s morals. So is their aunt Villeparisis. Ah, now, her I adore! There is a saint of a woman for you, the true type of the great ladies of the past. She’s not only virtue itself but reserve itself. She still says ‘Monsieur’ to the Ambassador Norpois whom she sees every day, and who, by the way, made an excellent impression in Turkey.”

I did not even reply to the Ambassadress, in order to listen to the genealogies. They were not all of them important. It happened indeed that one of the alliances about which I learned from M. de Guermantes in the course of the conversation was a misalliance, but one not without charm, for, uniting under the July Monarchy the Duc de Guermantes and the Duc de Fezensac with the two irresistible daughters of an eminent navigator, it gave to the two duchesses the unexpected piquancy of an exotically bourgeois, “Louisphilippically” Indian grace. Or else, under Louis XIV, a Norpois had married the daughter of the Duc de Mortemart, whose illustrious title, in that far-off epoch, struck the name Norpois, which I had found lacklustre and might have supposed to be recent, and engraved it deeply with the beauty of an old medal. And in these cases, moreover, it was not only the less well-known name that benefited by the association; the other, hackneyed by its very glitter, struck me more forcibly in this novel and more obscure aspect, just as among the portraits painted by a brilliant colourist the most striking is sometimes one that is all in black. The sudden mobility with which all these names seemed to me to have been endowed, as they sprang to take their places by the side of others from which I should have supposed them to be remote, was due not to my ignorance alone; the to-ings and fro-ings which they were performing in my mind had been performed no less readily at those epochs in which a title, being always attached to a piece of land, used to follow it from one family to another, so much so that, for example, in the fine feudal structure that is the title of Duc de Nemours or Duc de Chevreuse, I might discover successively, crouching as in the hospitable abode of a hermit-crab, a Guise, a Prince of Savoy, an Orléans, a Luynes. Sometimes several remained in competition for a single shell: for the Principality of Orange the royal house of the Netherlands and MM. de Mailly-Nesle, for the Duchy of Brabant the Baron de Charlus and the royal house of Belgium, various others for the titles of Prince of Naples, Duke of Parma, Duke of Reggio. Sometimes it was the other way; the shell had been so long uninhabited by proprietors long since dead that it had never occurred to me that this or that name of a castle could have been, at an epoch which after all was comparatively recent, the name of a family. Thus, when M. de Guermantes replied to a question put to him by M. de Monserfeuil: “No, my cousin was a fanatical royalist; she was the daughter of the Marquis de Féterne, who played some part in the Chouan rising,” on seeing this name Féterne, which to me, since my stay at Balbec, had been the name of a castle, become, what I had never dreamed that it