The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise.

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;

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.

I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum.

I was less sad than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration which the startling hue of her dress set between her and the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this comforted me.

For the fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one’s defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

in fairly numerous gatherings such as this, M. de Charlus kept almost continuously on show a smile without determinate direction or particular object, which, thereby pre-existing the greetings of new arrivals, remained, when the latter entered its zone, devoid of any amiable implication towards them.

Those charming associations that a young girl affords with a sea-shore, with the braided tresses of a statue in a church, with an old print, with everything that causes one to love in her, whenever she appears, a delightful picture, those associations are not very stable. When you come to live with a woman you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

Speaking of a duel I had fought,

When did this happen?

My food was brought to me in a little panelled room upstairs. The lamp went out during dinner and the serving-girl lighted a couple of candles. Pretending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate while she helped me to potatoes, I took her bare forearm in my hand, as though to guide her. Seeing that she did not withdraw it, I began to fondle it, then, without saying a word, pulled her towards me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some money. For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to require, to be properly enjoyed, not only this serving-girl but the timbered dining-room, so remote and isolated.

an irritation which she believed to be produced by her admirer but which was in fact due to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one’s time seeking it.

it frequently happened that it was Mme de Guermantes who had sought the acquaintance of the mistress in whom she hoped, and so greatly needed, to find a valuable ally against her dread husband.

and when a snobbish person, in other words a person not yet socially secure, began to be seen everywhere, he would be ferociously obstinate in his refusal to know that person, to allow himself to be introduced to him or her. His hatred of snobs derived from his snobbishness, but made the simple-minded (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness.

I can’t tell you how boring he was. He would be no stupider than anyone else if he had only had the sense, like many people we know, to remain a fool. It’s his veneer of knowledge that’s so terrible. He wants to have an open mind—open to all the things he doesn’t understand.

Ah, Ma’am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann’s. Faced with the alternatives of giving up my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person, I chose the first of these two calamities.

I chatted for a minute or two with Swann about the Dreyfus case and asked him how it was that all the Guermantes were anti-Dreyfusards. “In the first place because at heart all

these people are anti-semites,” replied Swann, who nevertheless knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who holds a strong opinion, preferred to explain the fact that other people did not share it by imputing to them preconceptions and prejudices against which there was

nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is being tormented, he cried out against these persecution...

“Oh, that fellow! I don’t even bother to consider him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he

allowed a wing of his castle to be burned to the ground because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds.”