e Guermantes, I said to myself:
"This lady is like the Duchesse de Guermantes." Now the chapel from
which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad; beneath
its flat tombstones, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb,
rested the bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having
heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Guermantes family,
whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there
was, indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes
who on that day, the very day on which she was expected to come there,
could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was
immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of
Mme. de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of
a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being
of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had I taken
into account that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme.
Sazerat; and the oval curve of her cheeks reminded me so strongly of
people whom I had seen at home that the suspicion brushed against my
mind (though it was immediately banished) that this lady in her creative
principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, was perhaps
not substantially the Duchesse de Guermantes, but that her body, in
ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain
type of femininity which included, also, the wives of doctors and
tradesmen. "It is, it must be Mme. de Guermantes, and no one else!" were
the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with
which I was gazing upon this image, which, naturally enough, bore no
resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of 'Mme. de
Guermantes,' appeared to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like
the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight for
the first time, only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was
not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others
that allowed themselves to imbibe the orange tint of 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 bef