re comes in all lives a time, towards which
you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of
light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the
stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what
the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence."

I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said,
it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed by the memory of a lady whom
I had seen recently for the first time; and thinking, now that I
knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local
aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I
summoned up all my courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you, by
any chance, know the lady--the ladies of Guermantes?" and I felt glad
because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over
it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an
objective existence in the world of spoken things.

But, at the sound of the word Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of
our friend's blue eyes a little brown dimple appear, as though they had
been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils,
reacting from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow.
His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been
stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and
smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a
good-looking martyr whose body bristles with arrows.

"No, I do not know them," he said, but instead of uttering so simple a
piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could
astonish me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have
befitted it, he recited it with a separate stress upon each word,
leaning forward, bowing his head, with at once the vehemence which a man
gives, so as to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though
the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some
strange accident of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding
himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation,
chooses to proclaim it aloud, so as to convince his hearers that the
confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, but is
easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation in question, in this
case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family, might very
well hav