If you’d only seen her, she weighed no more than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She would never listen to a word I said, she’d never send for the doctor. Ah, it wasn’t in that house that you’d have to gobble down your dinner. She liked her servants to be fed properly. Here, it’s been just the same again today; we’ve hardly had time for a snack. Everything has to be done on the run.”

What exasperated her more than anything were the slices of thin toast that my father used to eat. She was convinced that he indulged in them simply to give himself airs and to keep her “dancing.” “I can tell you frankly,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw the like.” He said this as if he had seen everything, and as if for him the range of an inexhaustible experience extended over all countries and their customs, among which was nowhere to be found the custom of eating slices of toast. “Yes, yes,” the butler muttered, “but that may all be changed; the workers are going on strike in Canada, and the Minister told Monsieur the other evening that he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself entirely honest, but since he regarded all politicians as shady, the crime of peculation seemed to him less serious than the pettiest larceny. He did not even stop to ask himself whether he had heard this historic utterance aright, and seemed not to have been struck by the improbability that such a thing should have been said by the guilty party himself to my father without my father’s immediately turning him out of the house. But the philosophy of Combray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that the strikes in Canada could have any repercussion on the consumption of toast. “Ah, well, as long as the world goes round, there’ll be masters to keep us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of this theory of perpetual trotting, for the last quarter of an hour my mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time as Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had been saying: “What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at table for at least two hours.” And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, “her” footman and the butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no thought of answering it, but rather as the first sounds of the instruments being tuned when the next part of a concert will soon begin, and one knows that there will be only a few minutes more of interval. And so, when the peals were repeated and became more urgent, our servants began to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much time left and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal somewhat louder than the rest gave a collective sigh and went their several ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette outside the door, Françoise, after a string of reflexions on ourselves, such as: “They’ve got the jumps today all right,” going up to tidy her attic, while the butler, having supplied himself first with note-paper from my bedroom, polished off the arrears of his private correspondence.

Despite the arrogant air of their butler, Françoise had been in a position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes occupied their mansion by virtue not of an immemorial right but of a quite recent tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked on the side that I did not know was quite small and just like all the neighbouring gardens, and I realised at last that there were not to be seen there pit and gallows or fortified mill, secret chamber, pillared dovecote, manorial bakehouse, tithe-barn or fortress, drawbridge or fixed bridge or even flying or toll bridge, charters, muniments, ramparts or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when the bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of salt water distributed over the earth’s surface, had suddenly restored to it a personality of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal painted by Whistler in his Harmonies in Blue and Silver, so the name Guermantes had seen the last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables perish under Françoise’s blows, when one day an old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess: “She has the highest position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; hers is the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” No doubt the most exclusive drawing-room, the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was little or nothing after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed. And yet this one too (and it was to be the last of the series), however humble it was, possessed something, quite apart from its material components, that amounted to an obscure differentiation.

And it became all the more essential that I should be able to explore in the “salon” of Mme de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery of her name, since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage. Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks that were irreducible to, impervious to the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, taking the place of my shattered dream, like a swan or a willow into which a god or nymph has been changed, and which henceforward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be shaken by the wind. And yet scarcely had I left her presence than those glittering fragments had reassembled like the green and roseate reflexions of the sunset behind the oar that has broken them, and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had quickly appropriated to itself my impression of the face. But now, frequently, I saw her at her window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least, if I did not succeed in integrating into the living woman the name Guermantes, in thinking of her as Mme de Guermantes, I could cast the blame on the impotence of my mind to carry through the act that I demanded of it; but she herself, our neighbour, seemed to commit the same error, commit it without discomfiture moreover, without any of my scruples, without even suspecting that it was an error. Thus Mme de Guermantes showed in her dresses the same anxiety to follow the fashion as if, believing herself to have become a woman like any other, she had aspired to that elegance in her attire in which ordinary women might equal and perhaps surpass her; I had seen her in the street gaze admiringly at a well-dressed actress; and in the morning, before she sallied forth on foot, as if the opinion of the passers-by, whose vulgarity she accentuated by parading familiarly through their midst her inaccessible life, could be a tribunal competent to judge her, I would see her in front of the glass playing, with a conviction free from all pretence or irony, with passion, with ill-humour, with conceit, like a queen who has consented to appear as a servant-girl in theatricals at court, the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked whether her veil was hanging properly, smoothed her cuffs, adjusted her cloak, as the divine swan performs all the movements natural to his animal species, keeps his eyes painted on either side of his beak without putting into them any glint of life, and darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, as a swan would, without remembering that he is a god. But as the traveller, disappointed by his first impression of a strange town, tells himself that he will doubtless succeed in penetrating its charm if he visits its museums and galleries, strikes up an acquaintance with its people, works in its libraries, so I assured myself that, had I been given the right of entry into Mme de Guermantes’s house, were I one of her friends, were I to penetrate into her life, I should then know what, within its glowing amber envelope, her name enclosed in reality, objectively, for other people, since, after all, my father’s friend had said that the Guermantes set was in a class of its own in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The life which I supposed them to lead there flowed from a source so different from anything in my experience, and must, I felt, be so out of the ordinary, that I could not have imagined the presence at the Duchess’s parties of people in whose company I myself had already been, of people who really existed. For, not being able suddenly to change their nature, they would have carried on conversations there of the sort that I knew; their partners would perhaps have stooped to reply to them in the same human speech; and, in the course of an evening spent in the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, there would have been moments identical with moments that I had already lived. Which was impossible. It is true that my mind was perplexed by certain difficulties, and the presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading house in the Faubourg being situated on the right bank of the river and so near that from my bedroom in the morning I could hear its carpets being beaten. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the Faubourg Saint-Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was purely ideal; I sensed that it was already part of the Faubourg when I saw, spread out on the other side of that Equator, the Guermantes doormat of which my mother had ventured to say, having like myself caught a glimpse of it one day when their door stood open, that it was in a shocking state. Besides, how could their dining-room, their dim gallery upholstered in red plush, into which I could see sometimes from our kitchen window, have failed to possess in my eyes the mysterious charm of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to form an essential part of it, to be geographically situated within it, since to have been entertained to dinner in that dining-room was to have gone into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to have breathed its atmosphere, since the people who, before going to table, sat down beside Mme de Guermantes on the leather-covered sofa in that gallery were all of the Faubourg Saint-Germain? No doubt elsewhere than in the Faubourg, at certain parties, one might see now and then, majestically enthroned amid the vulgar herd of fashion, one of those men who are no more than names and who alternately assume, when one tries to picture them to oneself, the aspect of a tourney or of a royal forest. But here, in the leading salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the dim gallery, there was no one but them. They were the columns, wrought of precious materials, that upheld the temple. Even for small and intimate gatherings it was from among them only that Mme de Guermantes could choose her guests, and in the dinners for twelve, assembled around the dazzling napery and plate, they were like the golden statues of the apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle, symbolic, dedicative pillars before the Lord’s Table. As for the tiny strip of garden that stretched between high walls at the back of the house, where in summer Mme de Guermantes had liqueurs and orangeade brought out after dinner, how could I not have felt that to sit there of an evening, between nine and eleven, on its iron chairs—endowed with a magic as potent as the leather sofa—without inhaling at the same time the breezes peculiar to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was as impossible as to take a siesta in the oasis of Figuig without thereby being necessarily in Africa? Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and create an atmosphere. Alas, those picturesque sites, those natural features, those local curiosities, those works of art of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, doubtless I should never be permitted to set my feet among them.