Indeed, Mme de Guermantes seemed to me at this time more attractive than in the days when I was still in love with her. Expecting less of her (I no longer went to visit her for her own sake), it was almost with the relaxed negligence one exhibits when alone, with my feet on the fender, that I listened to her as though I were reading a book written in the language of long ago. I was sufficiently detached to enjoy in what she said that pure charm of the French language which we no longer find either in the speech or in the writing of the present day. I listened to her conversation as to a folk song deliciously and purely French; I understood why I should have heard her deriding Maeterlinck (whom in fact she now admired, out of feminine weak-mindedness, influenced by those literary fashions whose rays spread slowly), as I understood why Mérimée had derided Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Paul-Louis Courier, Victor Hugo, Meilhac, Mallarmé. I was well aware that the critic had a far more restricted outlook than his victim, but also a purer vocabulary. That of Mme de Guermantes, almost as much as that of Saint-Loup’s mother, was enchantingly pure. It is not in the bloodless pastiches of the writers of today who say au fait (for “in reality”), singulièrement (for “in particular”), étonné (for “struck with amazement”), and the like, that we recapture the old speech and the true pronunciation of words, but in conversing with a Mme de Guermantes or a Françoise. I had learned from the latter, when I was five years old, that one did not say “the Tarn” but “the Tar;” not “Beam” but “Bear.” The effect of which was that at twenty, when I began to go into society, I had no need to be taught there that one ought not to say, like Mme Bontemps, “Madame de Beam.”

It would not be true to say that the Duchess was unaware of this earthy and quasi-peasant quality that survived in her, or was entirely innocent of affectation in displaying it. But, on her part, it was not so much the false simplicity of a great lady aping the countrywoman, or the pride of a duchess bent upon snubbing the rich ladies who express contempt for the peasants whom they do not know, as the quasi-artistic preference of a woman who knows the charm of what she possesses and is not going to spoil it with a coat of modern varnish. In the same way, everybody used to know a Norman innkeeper, landlord of the “William the Conqueror” at Dives, who had carefully refrained—a rare thing indeed—from giving his hostelry the modern comforts of a hotel, and, albeit a millionaire, retained the speech and the smock of a Norman peasant and allowed you to enter his kitchen and watch him prepare with his own hands, as in a farmhouse, a dinner which was nevertheless infinitely better, and even more expensive, than in the most luxurious hotel.

All the local sap that survives in the old noble families is not enough; it must be embodied in a person of sufficient intelligence not to despise it, not to obliterate it beneath a society veneer. Mme de Guermantes, unfortunately clever and Parisian and, when I knew her, retaining nothing of her native soil but its accent, had at least, when she wished to describe her life as a girl, contrived for her speech one of those compromises (between what would have seemed too spontaneously provincial on the one hand or artificially literary on the other) which form the attraction of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette or of certain legends related by Chateaubriand in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. My chief pleasure was in hearing her tell some anecdote which brought peasants into the picture with herself. The historic names, the old customs, gave to these blendings of the castle with the village a distinctly attractive savour. Having stayed in contact with the lands where it was sovereign, a certain type of aristocracy remains regional, so that the simplest utterance unfolds under our eyes a whole map of France, historical and geographical.

If there was no affectation, no deliberate effort to fabricate a special language, then this style of pronunciation was a regular museum of French history displayed in conversation. “My great-uncle Fitt-jam” was not at all surprising, for we know that the Fitz-James family are proud to boast that they are French nobles and do not like to hear their name pronounced in the English fashion. One must, however, marvel at the touching docility of the people who had previously supposed themselves obliged to pronounce certain names phonetically, and who, all of a sudden, after hearing the Duchesse de Guermantes pronounce them otherwise, adopted a pronunciation which they could never have guessed. Thus the Duchess, who had had a great-grandfather attending on the Comte de Chambord, liked to tease her husband for having turned Orleanist by proclaiming: “We old Frochedorf people …” The visitor, who had always imagined that he was correct in saying “Frohsdorf,” at once turned his coat, and ever afterwards might be heard saying “Frochedorf.”

On one occasion when I asked Mme de Guermantes who a young blood was whom she had introduced to me as her nephew but whose name I had failed to catch, I was none the wiser when from the back of her throat the Duchess uttered in a very loud but quite inarticulate voice: “C‘est l’ … i Eon, frère à Robert. He claims to have the same shape of skull as the ancient Welsh.” Then I realised that she had said: “C’est le petit Léon,” and that this was the Prince de Leon, who was indeed Robert de Saint-Loup’s brother-in-law. “I know nothing about his skull,” she went on, “but the way he dresses, and I must say he does dress very well, is not at all in the style of those parts. Once when I was staying at Josselin, with the Rohans, we all went over to a place of pilgrimage to which peasants had come from pretty well every part of Brittany. A great hulking villager from Leon stood gaping at Robert’s brother-in-law in his beige breeches. ‘What are you staring at me like that for?’ said Leon, ‘I bet you don’t know who I am.’ The peasant admitted as much. ‘Well,’ said Leon, ‘I’m your Prince.’ ‘Oh!’ said the peasant, taking off his cap and apologising. ‘I thought you were an Englische.’”

And if, seizing this point of departure, I led Mme de Guermantes on to talk about the Rohans (with whom her own family had frequently intermarried), her conversation would become impregnated with a hint of the melancholy charm of the Breton “pardons,” the calvary processions, and (as that true poet Pampille would say) with “the pungent flavour of buckwheat pancakes cooked over a gorse fire.”

Of the Marquis du Lau (whose sad end is familiar—when, himself deaf, he used to be taken to call on Mme H—who was blind), she would recall the less tragic years when, after the day’s sport, at Guermantes, he would change into slippers before having tea with the King of England, to whom he did not regard himself as inferior, and with whom, as we see, he did not stand on ceremony. She described all this so picturesquely that she seemed to invest him with the plumed musketeer hat of the somewhat vainglorious gentlemen of Périgord.

But even in the mere designation of people Mme de Guermantes, having remained herself a countrywoman—which was her great strength—would take care to distinguish between different provinces, and place people within them, as a Parisian-born woman could never have done, and those simple names, Anjou, Poitou, Périgord, re-created landscapes in her conversation.

To revert to the pronunciation and vocabulary of Mme de Guermantes, it is in this aspect that the nobility shows itself truly conservative, with everything that the word implies in the sense of being at once slightly puerile, slightly dangerous, stubborn in its resistance to change, but at the same time diverting to an artist. I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window.

Unfortunately, I never had time to prolong these visits indefinitely, for I was anxious, as far as possible, not to return home after Albertine. But it was only in driblets that I was able to obtain from Mme de Guermantes that information as to her clothes which was of use in helping me to order costumes similar in style, so far as it was possible for a young girl to wear them, for Albertine.

“For instance, Madame, that evening when you dined with Mme de Saint-Euverte, and then went on to the Princesse de Guermantes, you had a dress that was all red, with red shoes, you were marvellous, you reminded me of a sort of great blood-red blossom, a glittering ruby—now, what was that dress called? Is it the sort of thing that a young girl can wear?”

The Duchess, imparting to her tired features the radiant expression that the Princesse des Laumes used to wear when Swann paid her compliments years ago, glanced quizzically and delightedly, with tears of merriment in her eyes, at M. de Bréauté who was always there at that hour and who sat beaming behind his monocle with an indulgent smile for this intellectual’s rigmarole because of the physical excitement of youth which seemed to him to underlie it. The Duchess appeared to be saying: “What’s the matter with him? He must be mad.” Then turning to me with a winning expression: “I wasn’t aware that I looked like a glittering ruby or a blood-red blossom, but I do indeed remember that I had on a red dress: it was red satin, which was being worn that season.