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After lunch, when I went down to Mme de Guermantes, it was less for the sake of Mlle d’Eporcheville, who had been stripped, by Saint-Loup’s telegram, of the better part of her personality, than in the hope of finding in the Duchess herself one of those readers of my article who would enable me to form an idea of the impression that it had made upon those members of the public who were subscribers to or purchasers of the Figaro. It was not, incidentally, without pleasure that I went to see Mme de Guermantes. Although I told myself that what made her house different to me from all the rest was the fact that it had for so long haunted my imagination, by knowing the reason for this difference I did not abolish it. Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address-book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. Then once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes’s dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it. I forgot for an instant my own knowledge that none of this existed, as we think at times of a beloved friend forgetting for an instant that he is dead. Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess’s hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

On entering the drawing-room, I saw the fair girl whom I had supposed for twenty-four hours to be the girl of whom Saint-Loup had spoken to me. It was she who asked the Duchess to “reintroduce” me to her. And indeed, the moment I came into the room I had the impression that I knew her quite well, an impression which the Duchess however dispelled by saying: “Oh! so you’ve met Mlle de Forcheville before?” For, on the contrary, I was certain that I had never been introduced to any girl of that name, which would certainly have struck me, so familiar was it in my memory ever since I had been given a retrospective account of Odette’s love-affairs and Swann’s jealousy. In itself my twofold error as to the name, in having remembered “de l’Orgeville” as “d’Eporcheville” and in having reconstructed as “d’Eporcheville” what was in reality “Forcheville,” was in no way extraordinary. Our mistake lies in supposing that things present themselves as they really are, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable notion of them. But in reality this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world in a lopsided fashion. We repeat a name as we have heard it spoken until experience has corrected our mistake—something that does not always happen. Everyone at Combray had spoken to Françoise for twenty-five years of Mme Sazerat and Françoise continued to say “Mme Sazerin,” not from that deliberate and proud perseverance in error which was habitual with her, which was strengthened by our contradictions, and which was all that she had added of the egalitarian principles of 1789 to the France of Saint-André-des-Champs in her make-up (she claimed only one civic right, that of not pronouncing words as we did and of maintaining that “hotel,” “été” and “air” were of the feminine gender), but because she really did continue to hear “Sazerin.” This perpetual error, which is precisely “life,” does not bestow its countless forms merely upon the visible and the audible universe, but upon the social universe, the sentimental universe, the historical universe, and so forth. The Princesse de Luxembourg is no better than a prostitute in the eyes of