could possibly be, a family name, I felt the same astonishment as in reading a fairy-tale where turrets and a terrace come to life and turn into men and women. In this sense of the words, we may say that history, even mere family history, restores old stones to life. There have been in Parisian society men who played as considerable a part in it, who were more sought after for their distinction or for their wit, who were equally well born as the Duc de Guermantes or the Duc de La Trémoïlle. They have now fallen into oblivion because, as they left no descendants, their name, which we no longer hear, has an unfamiliar ring; at most, like the name of a thing beneath which we never think to discover the name of any person, it survives in some remote castle or village. The day is not distant when the traveller who, in the heart of Burgundy, stops in the little village of Charlus to look at its church, if he is not studious enough or is in too great a hurry to examine its tombstones, will go away ignorant of the fact that this name, Charlus, was that of a man who ranked with the highest in the land. This thought reminded me that it was time to go, and that while I listened to M. de Guermantes talking pedigrees, the hour was approaching at which I had promised to call on his brother. “Who knows,” I continued to muse, “whether one day Guermantes itself may appear nothing more than a place-name, save to the archaeologists who, stopping by chance at Combray and standing beneath the window of Gilbert the Bad, have the patience to listen to the account given them by Théodore’s successor or to read the Curé’s guide?” But so long as a great name is not extinct it keeps the men and women who bear it in the limelight; and doubtless to some extent the interest which the illustriousness of these families gave them in my eyes lay in the fact that one can, starting from today, follow their ascending course, step by step, to a point far beyond the fourteenth century, and find the diaries and correspondence of all the forebears of M. de Charlus, of the Prince d’Agrigente, of the Princesse de Parme, in a past in which an impenetrable darkness would cloak the origins of a middle-class family, and in which we make out, in the luminous backward projection of a name, the origin and persistence of certain nervous characteristics, vices and disorders of one or another Guermantes. Almost pathologically identical with their namesakes of the present day, they excite from century to century the startled interest of their correspondents, whether these be anterior to the Princess Palatine and Mme de Motteville, or subsequent to the Prince de Ligne.
However, my historical curiosity was faint in comparison with my aesthetic pleasure. The names cited had the effect of disembodying the Duchess’s guests—for all that they were called the Prince d’Agrigente or of Cystria—whose masks of flesh and unintelligence or vulgar intelligence had transformed them into ordinary mortals, so much so that I had made my landing on the ducal doormat not as upon the threshold (as I had supposed) but as at the terminus of the enchanted world of names. The Prince d’Agrigente himself, as soon as I heard that his mother had been a Damas, a granddaughter of the Duke of Modena, was delivered, as from an unstable chemical alloy, from the face and speech that prevented one from recognising him, and went to form with Damas and Modena, which themselves were only titles, an infinitely more seductive combination. Each name displaced by the attraction of another with which I had never suspected it of having any affinity left the unalterable position which it had occupied in my brain, where familiarity had dulled it, and, speeding to join the Mortemarts, the Stuarts or the Bourbons, traced with them branches of the most graceful design and ever-changing colour. The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful names—extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled—with which I learned only now that it was connected, a new and purely poetic sense and purpose. At the most, at the extremity