me to accept. Really, I said to myself, what point is there in forgoing the pleasures of social life if, as seems to be the case, the famous “work” which for so long I have been hoping every day to start the next day, is something I am not, or am no longer, made for and perhaps does not even correspond to any reality. This reasoning was, it is true, completely negative and merely deprived of their force those other reasons which might have dissuaded me from going to this fashionable concert. The positive reason that made me decide to go was the name of Guermantes, absent long enough from my mind to be able, when I read it upon the invitation card, to re-awaken a ray of my attention, to draw up from the depths of my memory a sort of section of the past of the Guermantes, attended by all the images of seigniorial forest and tall flowers which at that earlier time of my life had accompanied it, and to reassume for me the charm and the significance which I had found in it at Combray when, passing along the Rue de l’Oiseau on my way home, I used to see from outside, like some dark lacquer, the window of Gilbert the Bad, Lord of Guermantes. For a moment the Guermantes had once more seemed to me to be totally different from people in society, comparable neither with them nor with any living being, even a reigning prince, creatures begotten of the union of the sharp and windy air of the dark town of Combray in which my childhood had been spent with the past which could be sensed there, in the little street, at the height of the stained-glass window. I had had a longing to go to the Guermantes party as if in going there I must have been brought nearer to my childhood and to the depths of my memory where my childhood dwelt. And I had continued to read and re-read the invitation until in the end, rising in revolt, the letters which composed this name at once so familiar and so mysterious, like that of Combray itself, resumed their independence and outlined before my tired eyes a name that I seemed never to have seen before. (Mamma happened to be going to a little tea-party of Mme Sazerat’s which she knew beforehand she would find extremely boring, so I had no scruples about going to the Princesse de Guermantes’s.)
I took a cab to go to the Prince de Guermantes’s house, which was no longer his former home but a magnificent mansion that he had recently built in the Avenue du Bois. One of the mistakes of society people is not to realise that, if they want us to believe in them, it is first necessary that they should believe in themselves, or at least should respect the essential elements of our belief. At the time when I believed, even if I knew the contrary to be true, that the Guermantes lived in this or that grand house in virtue of a hereditary right, to penetrate into the palace of the sorcerer or the fairy, to compel to open before me the doors which yield only when one has pronounced the magic formula, seemed to me as difficult as to obtain an interview with the sorcerer or the fairy themselves. To persuade myself that the old manservant engaged twenty-four hours earlier or supplied by Potel and Chabot was the son, the grandson, the scion of a whole line of menials who had been in the family’s service since long before the Revolution was the easiest thing in the world, and I was only too happy to take for an ancestral portrait some painting which had been bought the previous month from Bernheim Jeune. But enchantment cannot be decanted from one vessel to another, memories are indivisible, and of the Prince de Guermantes, now that he had himself shattered the illusions of my belief by going to live in the Avenue du Bois, nothing much was left. The ceilings which I had once feared to see collapse upon the announcement of my name, those ceilings under which, for me, there would still have floated something of the enchantment and the fears of those early days, now looked down upon the parties of an American hostess in whom I took not the slightest interest. Intrinsically, material objects have in themselves no power, but, since it