The Guermantes Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3

by Marcel Proust

Of course, the things she does no longer appeal to us,

Saint-Loup’s mistress spoke of the best-known actresses in a tone of ironical superiority that annoyed me

being in a greenroom hung with portraits of old members

the waiters’ faces

actors of the Pala...

“Bonjour, you!”

“Bonjour, you!”

She would have liked to attract to her house all those women whom she had taken such pains to drive away.

lapidary rapidity

immortal instantaneousness.

the stream of flattery that, with a remarkable preciosity of expression, he kept pouring out,

“everybody knows what it means; a plumitive is a writer, a person who wields a plume.

through which there trailed, as over the steps of the church at Combray or the pâtisserie in the square, the rich and lazy gold of a country sun.

I thought I could see, where the extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence outline its frontiers: in

it was the scent and dust of twilight as they had been an hour ago,

with the point of her sunshade,

she made it a sort of element of good breeding when she was with a poet or a musician to talk only of the food that they were eating or the game of cards to which they would afterward sit down.

It had left beneath her present frivolity a sort of bedrock of greater solidity, invisibly nutritious,

I had difficulty in discovering, in the beautiful, too human face of Mme de Guermantes the unknown essence of her name,

they would have had to reflect that amaranthine color of the closing syllable of her name,

without seeming to feel that there were latent in her name the glow of yellowing woods in autumn

words that became accomplices of my dream.

added the duchess, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness.

Following a custom that was the fashion at that time, they laid their top hats on the floor near them.

“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme de Villeparisis explained.

But on hearing her name Mme de Villeparisis had declined, for it was that of Saint-Loup’s mistress.

let him bring Robert’s woman,”

Maybe it should read….let Robert bring his woman.

Robert’s mother, Mme de Marsantes,

One can’t get out of a cul-de-sac like that by merely doing a pirouette, or if one does there’s always the risk of falling into a quagmire.

One of Norpois’ best melange of cliches

for a lady came in who was the Comtesse de Marsantes, Robert’s mother.

she was the sister of the Duc de Guermantes.

presumably he imagines that things will just fall into my lap,490 that

One may mock the pedantic silliness with which diplomats of the Norpois type go into ecstasies over some piece of official wording that is, for all practical purposes, meaningless.

“Monsieur,” said Mme de Villeparisis to M. de Norpois, “you won’t forget that you have something to say to the prince about the Académie?”

Charles Morel,

the lady in pink)

Odette Swan

among the photographs that his father had sent me one of the portrait of Miss Sacripant (otherwise Odette) by Elstir,509 I said to Charles Morel as I went with him to the porte cochère: “I don’t suppose you can tell me, but did my uncle know this lady well?

It seems you made a great impression on the wench, and she hoped to see more of you.

Mme Swann, whose sumptuous, pansy-colored cloak floated over the baron’s knee, his roving eye, like that

of a street hawker who is watching all the time for the “cops”

that you were a hypocritical little flatterer.”

the discovery that a friend of my father, such as M. de Norpois was, could have expressed himself thus in speaking of me.

But I had only to remind myself that she had not even offered to let me see her Elstirs.

I’ll dash off to Boucheron’s and get the necklace.

I’ll run to the jeweler’s and then go and ask her to forgive me.

but the anguish that Rachel’s absence provoked in him

splendid ornament

But it came to the same thing, for she would not look at it, and even after their reconciliation he could never persuade her to accept it.

Robert was unaware of almost all of the infidelities of his mistress

“He has asked me to walk a short way with him,” I answered blithely.