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

by Marcel Proust

The Duchesse de Guermantes, who languished whenever people spoke of the beauty of any woman other than herself, let the conversation drop.

“But we never heard a word about it! One of Oriane’s puns! It’s sure to be delicious. Oh, do tell us!”

‘Teaser, teaser? Then he must be Teaser Augustus.’

“Ah! Teaser Augustus,”

“I must say, ‘Teaser Augustus’ pleases me enormously as a piece of

‘phrasing,’”

or that there was a great deal of Italian music in Wagner,

due to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one is content to do nothing else than seek it.

a new and succulent paradox,

to set sparkling its epigrammatic malice.

orchestra seat in which she had arrived before the curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening to,” she explained,

Mme de Guermantes had no hesitation in exchanging with her husband a glance of ironical connivance.

“Didn’t he once start a portrait of you, Oriane?” asked the Princesse de Parme.

“Yes, in shrimp pink,”

Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the gait of the little band of girls along the seashore.

all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of the aristocracy from around Combray,

what I had sought for in her, the charm of the name Guermantes,

was diverted to some other woman of equal mediocrity who exuded the same unconscious charm.

inevitable disappointments that he is destined to find in people, as in the theater, in his travels, and indeed in love.

chicken financière)

there was a brill cooked in carbolic acid! I assure you, it wasn’t a dinner table, it was far more like an operating table.

He has a woman’s heart, Mémé has!”

“There’s nothing effeminate about Mémé, I know nobody so manly as he is.”

her relationship with Général de Monserfeuil seeming to have rapidly become more distant as soon as it became a question of her asking him for anything.

seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle.

in a sort of social Eucharist;

He must nevertheless have remembered that the course of events had been totally different.

to think that they were witnessing one of Oriane’s very “latest”

“In my family all the men are brave and the women chaste”?

Vermeer’s View of Delft.

That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been for me at first a disappointment;

contained nothing of that mysterious strangeness that had been suggested to us by her name,

“he is passionately fond of the arts; he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake:

if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it.

If he detests anything there can be no more doubt about it, the ...

when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity.”

schtubid.

schtubidity

He will tell you that we have never heard Norpois speak about anyone so kindly as he spoke to us of you.

sound brought to my ears that name, Guermantes, in the forgotten tone in which I used to hear it long ago, so different from that in which it was used to designate the genial hosts with whom I was dining this evening.

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years.

We are obliged to build over what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation,

on seeing this name Féterne, which had been for me, since my stay at Balbec, the name of a château,

become, what I had never dreamed that it could possibly be, a family name,

we never think to discover the name of any person, it survives in some château,

like the ancestors of Jesus in the old Jesse windows,

They uttered nothing but trivialities, doubtless because I was in the room,

in the carriage that was taking me to that of M. de Charlus.

in the carriage that was taking me to M. de Charlus,

once at Combray,