The Guermantes Way

Only imagination and belief can differentiate certain objects and people from the rest, and create a particular atmosphere.

However, the fairy wastes away when we come into contact with the actual person to whom her name corresponds, for the name then begins to reflect that person who contains nothing of the fairy; the fairy can reappear if we absent ourselves from the person, but if we stay in the person’s presence the fairy dies for ever and with her the name, as with the Lusignan family,1 which was fated to become extinct on the day when the fairy Mélusine should die. So the Name, beneath the successive retouchings which might eventually lead us to discover the original handsome portrait of an unknown woman we have never met, becomes no more than the mere photograph on an identity card to which we refer when we need to decide whether we know, whether or not we should acknowledge a person we encounter. But should a sensation from the distant past – like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them2 –

the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name, it is not only to cities and ruins that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, it is not only the physical world that they spangle with differences and people with marvels, it is the social world as well: so every historic house, every famous residence or palace, has its lady or its fairy, as forests have their spirits and rivers their deities.