Page 271 - swanns-way

a sonorous syllable, but which was so real that everything,
even to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose, gave
an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life, as in a
transformation scene on the stage a crease in the dress of
a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger, indicate the material
presence of a living actress before our eyes, whereas we were
uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely at
a projection of limelight from a lantern.
Meanwhile I was endeavouring to apply to this image,
which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down
and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they
that had first struck it, that had made the first impression
on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the
woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be
Mme. de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging im-
age the idea: ‘It is Mme. de Guermantes”; but I succeeded
only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as
though they were two discs moving in separate planes, with
a space between. But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I
had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a
real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh in-
crease of power over my imagination, which, paralysed for
a moment by contact with a reality so different from any-
thing that it had expected, began to react and to say within
me: ‘Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the
Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vas-
sals; the Duchesse de Guermantes descends from Geneviève
de Brabant. She does not know, nor would she consent to
know, any of the people who are here to-day.’

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