The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

I had not known to what to attribute her change of direction, when I had seen her diverge from her stellar path, come to sit down beside me, and invite me to dinner, the effect of unexplained causes: for want of a special sense to enlighten us in this respect, we imagine the people we know only slightly—as was my case with the Duchesse de Guermantes—as thinking of us only at the rare moments in which they set eyes on us. Whereas in fact this ideal oblivion in which we picture them as holding us is purely arbitrary. So much so that while in the silence of solitude, reminiscent of a clear and starlit night, we imagine the various queens of society pursuing their course in the heavens at an infinite distance, we cannot help an involuntary start of dismay or pleasure if there falls upon us from that starry height, like a meteorite engraved with our name which we supposed to be unknown on Venus or Cassiopeia, an invitation to dinner or a piece of wicked gossip.