Guermantes it was utterly unknown, and, being somewhat muddle-headed, she replied in all good faith to a young girl who asked her how Mme de Saint-Loup was related to their host, the Prince de Guermantes: “Through the Forche villes,” a piece of information which the girl passed on as if she had known it all her life to one of her friends, a bad-tempered and nervous girl, who turned as red as a turkeycock the first time a gentleman said to her that it was not through the Forchevilles that Gilberte was connected with the Guermantes, with the result that the gentleman supposed that he had made a mistake, adopted the erroneous explanation himself and lost no time in propagating it. For the American woman dinner-parties and fashionable entertainments were a sort of Berlitz School. She heard the names and she repeated them, without having first learnt their precise value and significance. To someone who asked whether Tansonville had come to Gilberte from her father M. de Forcheville I heard the explanation given that, on the contrary, it was a property in her husband’s family, that Tansonville was a neighbouring estate to Guermantes and had belonged to Mme de Marsantes, that it had been heavily mortgaged and the mortgage paid off with Gilberte’s dowry. And finally, a veteran of the old guard having exchanged memories with me of Swann, friend of the Sagans and the Mouchys, and Bloch’s American friend having asked me how I had known Swann, the old man declared that this must have been in the house of Mme de Guermantes, not suspecting that what Swann represented for me was a country neighbour and a young friend of my grandfather. Mistakes of this kind have been made by the most distinguished men and are regarded as particularly serious in any society of a conservative temper. Saint-Simon, wishing to show that Louis XIV was of an ignorance which “sometimes made him fall, in public, into the most gross absurdities,” gives of this ignorance only two examples, which are that the King, not knowing either that Renel belonged to the family of Clermont-Gallerande or that Saint-Herem belonged to that of Montmorin, treated these two men as though they were of low extraction. But at least, in so far as concerns Saint-Herem, we have the consolation of knowing that the King did not die in error, for “very late in life” he was disabused by M. de La Rochefoucauld. “Even then,” adds Saint-Simon with a touch of pity, “it was necessary to explain to him what these houses were, for their names conveyed nothing to him.”
This forgetfulness, which with its vigorous growth covers so rapidly even the most recent past, this encroaching ignorance, creates as its own counter-agent a minor species of erudition, all the more precious for being rare, which is concerned with genealogies, the true social position of people, the reasons of love or money or some other kind for which they have allied or misallied themselves in marriage with this family or that, an erudition which is highly prized in all societies where a conservative spirit rules, which my grandfather possessed in the highest degree with regard to the middle classes of Combray and of Paris and which Saint-Simon valued so highly that when he comes to celebrate the marvellous intelligence of the Prince de Conti, before speaking of the recognised branches of knowledge, or rather as though this were the first of them all, he praises him as “a man of a very fine mind, enlightened, just, exact, wide-ranging; vastly well read and of a retentive memory; skilled in genealogies, their chimeras and their realities; of a politeness variously accommodated to rank and merit, rendering all those courtesies that the princes of the blood owe but no longer render and even explaining why he acted as he did and how the other princes exceeded their rights. The knowledge which he had gained from books and from conversation afforded him material for the most obliging comments possible upon the birth, the offices, etc.” In a less exalted sphere, in all that pertained to the bourgeois society of Combray and Paris, my grandfather