Guermantes

The name Guermantes itself received from all the beautiful names — extinct, and so all the more glowingly rekindled — with which I learned only now that it was connected, a new sense and purpose, purely poetical.

The Guermantes Way 2003

And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been filled wilh oxygen, or some such gas; when

The Guermantes Way 2003

Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks irreducible to, impenetrable by, the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the

The Guermantes Way 2003

After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the

The Guermantes Way 2003

I felt surprised only that the likeness of those woods was not more discernible on the face of the Duchess, about which there was nothing suggestive of vegetation, and at the most the ruddy discolouration of her cheeks — which ought rather, surely, to have been emblazoned with the name Guermantes — was the effect, but did not furnish a picture of long gallops in the open air.

The Guermantes Way 2003

Now, even before I had met the Duchess, the name Guermantes preceded by the title of Princess, like a note or a colour or quantity, profoundly modified from the surrounding values by the mathematical or aesthetic sign that governs it, had already suggested to me something entirely different.

The Guermantes Way 2003

Just as the name Guermantes had lost the significance and the charm of a road bordered with flowers in purple and ruddy clusters and of the window of Gilbert the Bad,

The Sweet Cheat Gone 2003

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.

Swann's Way Marcel Proust 1896

‘Harmonies in Blue and Silver,’ so the name Guermantes had seen perish under the strokes of Françoise’s hammer the last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables when one day an old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess:

The Guermantes Way 2003

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.

Swann's Way 2003