antern
sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the
ceiling--in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age,
and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
resounding syllable 'antes.' And if, in spite of that, they were for
me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of
an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously
distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes
of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit 'Guermantes way'
of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its
overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons.
And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duc and Duchesse de
Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain
attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied
themselves by marriage, and so became Counts of Combray, the first
citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones among
its citizens who did not reside in it--Comtes de Combray, possessing
Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it
in their personalities, and illustrating, no doubt, in themselves that
strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors
of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
presumably, out of doors, in the street, between heaven and earth, like
that Gilbert de Guermantes, of whom I could see, in the stained glass of
the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the 'other side' in dull black lacquer,
if I raised my eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus's for a
packet of salt.

And then it happened that, going the 'Guermantes way,' I passed
occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges
rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain
some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my
eyes a fragment of that riverside country which I had longed so much
to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my
favourite authors. And it was with that story-book land, with its
imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that
Guermantes, changing its form in my mind, became identified, after I
heard Dr. Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and
fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream
that Mm