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By Root 1947 0

were normally embedded, that my electrified hands could not hold out for longer than forty-eight hours against the force that drew them towards the volume in which were bound up the Orientales and the Chants du Crépuscule. I cursed Françoise’s footman for having made a present to his native village of my copy of the Feuilles d’Automne, and sent him off without a moment’s delay to buy me another. I read these volumes from cover to cover and found peace of mind only when I suddenly came across, awaiting me in the light in which she had bathed them, the lines which Mme de Guermantes had quoted to me. For all these reasons, conversations with the Duchess resembled the discoveries that we make in the library of a country house, out of date, incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, lacking in almost everything that we value, but offering us now and then some curious scrap of information, or even a quotation from a fine passage which we did not know and as to which we are glad to remember in after years that we owe our knowledge of it to a stately baronial mansion. We are then, as a result of having found Balzac’s preface to the Chartreuse, or some unpublished letters of Joubert, tempted to exaggerate the value of the life we led there, the barren frivolity of which we forget for this windfall of a single evening.

From this point of view, if this world had been unable at the outset to respond to what my imagination expected, and was consequently to strike me first of all by what it had in common with every other world rather than by the ways in which it differed from them, it yet revealed itself to me by degrees as something quite distinct. Noblemen are almost the only people from whom one learns as much as one does from peasants; their conversation is adorned with everything that concerns the land, dwellings as people used to live in them long ago, old customs, everything of which the world of money is profoundly ignorant. Even supposing that the aristocrat most moderate in his aspirations has finally caught up with the period in which he lives, his mother, his uncles, his great-aunts keep him in touch, when he recalls his childhood, with the conditions of a life almost unknown today. In the death-chamber of a contemporary corpse Mme de Guermantes would not have pointed out, but would immediately have noticed, all the lapses from traditional customs. She was shocked to see women mingling with the men at a funeral, when there was a particular ceremony which ought to be celebrated for the women. As for the pall, the use of which Bloch would doubtless have believed to be confined to coffins, on account of the pall bearers of whom one reads in the reports of funerals, M. de Guermantes could remember the time when, as a child, he had seen it borne at the wedding of M. de Mailly-Nesle. While Saint-Loup had sold his priceless “genealogical tree,” old portraits of the Bouillons, letters of Louis XIII, in order to buy Carrières and Art Nouveau furniture, M. and Mme de Guermantes, actuated by a sentiment in which a fervent love of art may have played very little part and which left them themselves more commonplace, had kept their marvellous Boulle furniture, which presented an ensemble altogether more seductive to an artist. A literary man would similarly have been enchanted by their conversation, which would have been for him—for a hungry man has no need of another to keep him company—a living dictionary of all those expressions which every day are becoming more and more forgotten: St Joseph ties, children pledged to wear blue for Our Lady, and so forth, which one finds today only among those who have constituted themselves the amiable and benevolent custodians of the past. The pleasure that a writer experiences among them, far more than among other writers, is not without danger, for there is a risk of his coming to believe that the things of the past have a charm in themselves, of his transferring them bodily into his work, still-born in that case, exhaling a tedium for which he consoles himself with the reflexion: “It’s attractive