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By Root 1625 0

princess paramount of the place and lady of the lake, as if her face and her speech must possess the local charm of forest groves and streams, and the same time-honoured characteristics as the old customs recorded in her archives. But then I had met Saint-Loup; he had told me that the castle had borne the name of Guermantes only since the seventeenth century, when his family had acquired it. They had lived, until then, in the neighbourhood, but their title did not come from those parts. The village of Guermantes had received its name from the manor round which it had been built, and so that it should not destroy the manorial view, a servitude that was still in force had traced the line of its streets and limited the height of its houses. As for the tapestries, they were by Boucher, bought in the nineteenth century by a Guermantes with a taste for the arts, and hung, interspersed with a number of mediocre sporting pictures which he himself had painted, in a hideous drawing-room upholstered in “adrianople” and plush. By these revelations, Saint-Loup had introduced into the castle elements foreign to the name of Guermantes which made it impossible for me to continue to extract solely from the resonance of the syllables the stone and mortar of its walls. Then in the depths of this name the castle mirrored in its lake had faded, and what now became apparent to me, surrounding Mme de Guermantes as her dwelling, had been her house in Paris, the Hôtel de Guermantes, limpid like its name, for no material and opaque element intervened to interrupt and occlude its transparency. As the word church signifies not only the temple but also the assembly of the faithful, this Hôtel de Guermantes comprised all those who shared the life of the Duchess, but these intimates on whom I had never set eyes were for me only famous and poetic names, and, knowing exclusively persons who themselves too were only names, served to enhance and protect the mystery of the Duchess by extending all round her a vast halo which at the most declined in brilliance as its circumference increased.

In the entertainments which she gave, since I could not imagine the guests as possessing bodies, moustaches, boots, as making any utterance that was commonplace, or even original in a human and rational way, this vortex of names, introducing less material substance than would a phantom banquet or a spectral ball, round that statuette in Dresden china which was Mme de Guermantes, gave her mansion of glass the transparency of a showcase. Then, after Saint-Loup had told me various anecdotes about his cousin’s chaplain, her gardeners and the rest, the Hôtel de Guermantes had become—as the Louvre might have been in days gone by—a kind of palace surrounded, in the very heart of Paris, by its own domains, acquired by inheritance, by virtue of an ancient right that had quaintly survived, over which she still enjoyed feudal privileges. But this last dwelling had itself vanished when we came to live near Mme de Villeparisis in one of the apartments adjoining that occupied by Mme de Guermantes in a wing of the Hôtel. It was one of those old town houses, a few of which for all I know may still be found, in which the main courtyard was flanked—alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, perhaps, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered round the overlord—by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for instance, or a tailor’s, such as we see nestling between the buttresses of those cathedrals which the aesthetic zeal of the restorer has not swept clear of such accretions, and a porter who also did cobbling, kept hens, grew flowers—and, at the far end, in the main house, a “Countess” who, when she drove out in her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which seemed to have escaped from the plot by the lodge (with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who got down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighbourhood), dispensed smiles and little waves of the hand impartially to the