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Updated: June 27, 2025
We would pass, in the Rue de l'Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes, and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them.
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.
Never, in the course of our walks along the 'Guermantes way, might we penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell.
And yet they refuse to renew the floor for me because, if you please, those are the tombstones of the Abbots of Combray and the Lords of Guermantes, the old Counts, you know, of Brabant, direct ancestors of the present Duc de Guermantes, and of his Duchesse also, since she was a lady of the Guermantes family, and married her cousin."
And if I asked him, "Do you know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker would reply, "No, I have never cared to know them."
Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville.
And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would fly upstairs to my aunt Leonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her by our bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that, on the contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the 'Guermantes way, and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew well enough that one could never say at what time one would be home.
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!
No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my life."
And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come, rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling than if it was on the sea!" when my father's appeals to the gardener had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession, then some one would say, at dinner: "To-morrow, if the weather holds, we might go the Guermantes way."
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