In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV

by Marcel Proust

  “Ah! I know her,” said Ski, who had met her once when he was out for a drive with Mme Verdurin.

  “Not in the biblical sense of the word, I trust,” said the doctor, darting a sly glance through his eyeglass; this was one of his favourite pleasantries.

  “She is intelligent,” Ski informed me. “Naturally,” he went on, seeing that I said nothing, and dwelling with a smile upon each word, “she is intelligent and at the same time she is not, she lacks education, she is frivolous, but she has an instinct for pretty things. She may say nothing, but she will never say anything silly. And besides, her colouring is charming. She would be fun to paint,” he added, half shutting his eyes as though he saw her posing in front of him.

  As my opinion of her was quite the opposite of what Ski was expressing with so many qualifications, I observed merely that she was the sister of a very distinguished engineer, M. Legrandin.

  “There, you see, you are going to be introduced to a pretty woman,” Brichot said to me, “and one never knows what may come of that. Cleopatra was not even a great lady, she was the little woman, the thoughtless, dreadful little woman of our Meilhac, and just think of the consequences, not only to that dupe Antony, but to the whole of the ancient world.”

  “I’ve already been introduced to Mme de Cambremer,” I replied.

  “Ah! In that case, you will find yourself on familiar ground.”

  “I shall be all the more delighted to meet her,” I answered him, “because she has promised me a book by the former curé of Combray about the place-names of this region, and I shall be able to remind her of her promise. I’m interested in that priest, and also in etymologies.”

  “Don’t put too much faith in the ones he gives,” replied Brichot, “there’s a copy of the book at La Raspelière, which I’ve glanced through casually without finding anything of any value; it’s riddled with errors. Let me give you an example. The word bricq is found in a number of place-names in this neighbourhood. The worthy cleric had the distinctly eccentric idea that it comes from briga, a height, a fortified place. He finds it already in the Celtic tribes, Latobriges, Nemetobriges, and so forth, and traces it down to such names as Briand, Brion, and so forth. To confine ourselves to the region through which we have the pleasure of travelling with you at this moment, Bricquebosc, according to him, would mean the wood on the height, Bricqueville the habitation on the height, Bricquebec, where we shall be stopping presently before coming to Maineville, the height by the stream. Now it’s not like that at all, since bricq is the old Norse word which means simply a bridge. Just as fleur, which Mme de Cambremer’s protégé takes infinite pains to connect, in one place with the Scandinavian words floi, flo, in another with the Irish words ae and aer, is on the contrary, beyond any doubt, the fjord of the Danes, and means harbour. Similarly, the excellent priest thinks that the station of Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu, which adjoins La Raspelière, means Saint-Martin-le-Vieux (vetus). It is unquestionable that the word vieux has played an important part in the toponymy of this region. Vieux comes as a rule from vadum, and means a ford, as at the place called les Vieux. It is what the English call ford (Oxford, Hereford). But, in this particular instance, Vêtu is derived not from vetus, but from vastatus, a place that is devastated and bare. You have, round about here, Sottevast, the vast of Setold, Brillevast, the vast of Berold. I am all the more certain of the curé’s mistake in that Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu was formerly called Saint-Martin-du-Gast and even Saint-Martin-de-Terregate. Now the v and the g in these words are the same letter. We say dévaster, but also gâcher. Jachères and gâtines11 (from the High German wastinna) have the same meaning: Terregate is therefore terra vastata. As for Saint-Mars, formerly (evil be to him who evil thinks) Saint-Merd, it is Saint-Medardus, which appears variously as Saint-Médard, Saint-Mard, Saint-Marc, CinqMars, and even Dammas. Nor must we forget that, quite close to here, places bearing the name Mars simply attest to a pagan origin (the god Mars) which has remained alive in this country but which the holy man refuses to recognise. The high places dedicated to the gods are especially frequent, such as the mount of Jupiter (Jeumont). Your curé declines to admit this, and yet, on the other hand, wherever Christianity has left traces, they escape him. He has gone as far afield as Loctudy, a barbarian name, according to him, whereas it is Locus sancti Tudeni; nor, in the name Sammercoles, has he divined Sanctus Martialis. Your curé,” Brichot continued, seeing that I was interested, “derives the terminations hon, home, holm, from the word holl (hullus), a hill, whereas it comes from the Norse holm, an island, with which you are familiar in Stockholm, and which is so widespread throughout this region: la Houlme, Engohomme, Tahoume, Robehomme, Néhomme, Quettehou, and so forth.”

  These names reminded me of the day when Albertine had wished to go to Amfreville-la-Bigot (from the name of two successive lords of the manor, Brichot told me), and had then suggested that we should dine together at Robehomme. “Isn’t Néhomme,” I asked, “somewhere near Carquethuit and Clitourps?”

  “Precisely; Néhomme is the holm, the island or peninsula of the famous Viscount Nigel, whose name has survived also in Néville. The Carquethuit and Clitourps that you mention provide Mme de Cambremer’s protégé with an occasion for further errors. Of course he realises that carque is a church, the Kirche of the Germans. You will remember Querqueville, Carquebut, not to mention Dunkerque. For there we should do better to stop and consider the famous word dun, which to the Celts meant high ground. And that you will find over the whole of France. Your abbé was hypnotised by Duneville. But in the Eure-et-Loir he would have found Châteaudun, Dunle-Roi in the Cher, Duneau in the Sarthe, Dun in the Ariège, Dune-les-Places in the Nièvre, and many others. This word dun leads him into a curious error with regard to Douville, where we shall be alighting, where we shall find Mme Verdurin’s comfortable carriages awaiting us. Douville, in Latin donvilla, says he. And Douville does indeed lie at the foot of high hills. Your curé, who knows everything, feels all the same that he has made a blunder. And indeed he has found, in an old cartulary, the name Domvilla. Whereupon he retracts; Douville, according to him, is a fief belonging to the abbot, domino abbati, of Mont-Saint-Michel. He is delighted with the discovery, which is distinctly odd when one thinks of the scandalous life that, according to the capitulary of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, was led at Mont-Saint-Michel, though no more extraordinary than to picture the King of Denmark as suzerain of all this coast, where he encouraged the worship of Odin far more than that of Christ. On the other hand, the supposition that the n has been changed to m doesn’t shock me, and requires less alteration than the perfectly correct Lyon, which also is derived from Dun (Lugdunum). But the fact is, the abbé is mistaken. Douville was never Donville, but Doville, Eudonis villa, the village of Eudes. Douville was formerly called Escalecliff, the steps up the cliff. About the year 1233, Eudes le Bouteiller, Lord of Escalecliff, set out for the Holy Land; on the eve of his departure he made over the church to the Abbey of Blanchelande. By an exchange of courtesies, the village took his name, whence we have Douville today. But I must add that toponymy, of which moreover I know little or nothing, is not an exact science; had we not this historical evidence, Douville might quite well come from Ouville, that is to say les Eaux, the Waters. The forms in ai (Aigues-Mortes) of aqua are constantly changed to eu or ou. Now there were, quite close to Douville, certain famous springs. You can imagine that the curé was only too glad to find Christian traces there, especially as this area seems to have been pretty hard to evangelise, since successive attempts were made by St Ursal, St Gofroi, St Barsanore, St Laurent of Brèvedent, who finally handed over the task to the monks of Beaubec. But as regards tuit the writer is mistaken; he sees it as a form of toft, a building, as in Cricquetot, Ectot, Yvetot, whereas it is the thveit, the assart or reclaimed land, as in Braquetuit, le Thuit, Regnetuit, and so forth. Similarly, if he recognises in Clitourps the Norman thorp which means village, he maintains that the first syllable of the word must come from clivus, a slope, whereas it comes
from cliff, a precipice. But his biggest blunders are due not so much to his ignorance as to his prejudices. However good a Frenchman one is, there is no need to fly in the face of the evidence and take Saint-Laurent-en-Bray to be the famous Roman priest, when he is actually Saint Lawrence O’Toole, Archbishop of Dublin. But even more than his patriotic sentiments, your friend’s religious bigotry leads him into outrageous errors. Thus you have not far from our hosts at La Raspelière two places called Montmartin, Montmartin-sur-Mer and Montmartin-en-Graignes. In the case of Graignes, the good curé is quite right, he has recognised that Graignes, in Latin grania, in Greek krene, means ponds, marshes; how many instances of Cresmays, Croen, Grenneville, Lengronne, could one not cite? But when he comes to Montmartin, your self-styled linguist positively insists that these must be parishes dedicated to St Martin. He bases his assertion on the fact that that saint is the patron of the two villages, but does not realise that he was only recognised as such subsequently; or rather he is blinded by his hatred of paganism; he refuses to see that we should say Mont-Saint-Martin as we say Mont-Saint-Michel if it were a question of St Martin, whereas the name Montmartin refers in a far more pagan fashion to temples dedicated to the god Mars, temples of which, it is true, no other vestige remains, but which the undisputed existence in the neighbourhood of vast Roman camps would render more probable even without the name Montmartin, which removes all doubt. You see that the little book which you will find at La Raspelière is far from perfect.”

  I protested that at Combray the curé had often told us about interesting etymologies.

  “He was probably better on his own ground. The move to Normandy must have made him lose his bearings.”

  “It didn’t restore his health,” I added, “for he came here with neurasthenia and went away again with rheumatism.”

  “Ah, his neurasthenia is to blame. He has lapsed from neurasthenia into philology, as my worthy master Poquelin would have said. Tell us, Cottard, do you suppose that neurasthenia can have a pernicious effect on philology, philology a soothing effect on neurasthenia, and the relief from neurasthenia lead to rheumatism?”

  “Absolutely: rheumatism and neurasthenia are vicarious forms of neuro-arthritism. You may pass from one to the other by metastasis.”

  “The eminent professor,” said Brichot, “expresses himself, God forgive me, in a French as highly infused with Latin and Greek as M. Purgon himself, of Molièresque memory! Help me, uncle, I mean our sainted Sarcey . . .”12

  But he was prevented from finishing his sentence for Cottard had leapt from his seat with a wild shout: “The devil!” he exclaimed on regaining his power of articulate speech, “we’ve passed Maineville (d’you hear?) and Renneville too.” He had just noticed that the train was stopping at Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, where most of the passengers alighted. “They can’t have run through without stopping. We must have failed to notice while we were talking about the Cambremers. Listen to me, Ski, wait a moment, I’m going to tell you something good” (Cottard had taken a fancy to this expression, in common use in certain medical circles). “The Princess must be on the train, she can’t have seen us, and will have got into another compartment. Come along and find her. Let’s hope this won’t land us in the soup?

  And he led us all off in search of Princess Sherbatoff. He found her in the corner of an empty compartment, reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. She had long ago, from fear of rebuffs, acquired the habit of keeping her place, or remaining in her corner, in life as in trains, and of not offering her hand until the other person had greeted her. She went on reading as the faithful trooped into her carriage. I recognised her immediately; this woman who might have forfeited her social position but was nevertheless of exalted birth, who in any event was the pearl of a salon such as the Verdurins’, was the lady whom, on the same train, I had put down two days earlier as possibly the keeper of a brothel. Her social personality, which had been so doubtful, became clear to me as soon as I learned her name, just as when, after racking our brains over a puzzle, we at length hit upon the word which clears up all the obscurity, and which, in the case of a person, is his name. To discover two days later who the person is with whom one has travelled in a train is a far more amusing surprise than to read in the next number of a magazine the clue to the problem set in the previous number. Big restaurants, casinos, local trains, are the family portrait galleries of these social enigmas.

  “Princess, we must have missed you at Maineville! May we come and sit in your compartment?”

  “Why, of course,” said the Princess who, upon hearing Cottard address her, but only then, raised from her magazine a pair of eyes which, like the eyes of M. de Charlus, although gentler, saw perfectly well the people of whose presence she pretended to be unaware. Cottard, reflecting that the fact of my having been invited to meet the Cambremers was a sufficient recommendation, decided, after a momentary hesitation, to introduce me to the Princess, who bowed with great courtesy but appeared to be hearing my name for the first time.

  “Confound it!” cried the Doctor, “my wife has forgotten to have the buttons on my white waistcoat changed. Ah, women! They never remember anything. Don’t you ever marry, my boy,” he said to me. And as this was one of the pleasantries which he considered appropriate when he had nothing else to say, he peeped out of the corner of his eye at the Princess and the rest of the faithful, who, because he was a professor and an Academician, smiled back at him, admiring his good humour and lack of arrogance.

  The Princess informed us that the young violinist had been found. He had been confined to bed the day before by a sick headache, but was coming that evening and bringing with him a friend of his father whom he had met at Doncières. She had learned this from Mme Verdurin with whom she had lunched that morning, she told us in a rapid voice, rolling her rs, with her Russian accent, softly at the back of her throat, as though they were not rs but ls. “Ah! you lunched with her this morning,” Cottard said to the Princess, but his eyes were on me, for the object of this remark was to show me on what intimate terms the Princess was with the Mistress. “You really are one of the faithful!”

  “Yes, I love this little gloup, so intelligent, so agleeable, so simple, not snobbish or spiteful, and clevel to their fingel-tips.”

  “Devil take it! I must have lost my ticket, I can’t find it anywhere,” cried Cottard, without being unduly alarmed. He knew that at Douville, where a couple of landaus would be awaiting us, the collector would let him pass without a ticket, and would only touch his cap the more deferentially in order to provide an explanation for his leniency, which was that he had of course recognised Cottard as one of the Verdurins’ regular guests. “They won’t shove me in the lock-up for that,” the Doctor concluded.

  “You were saying, Monsieur,” I inquired of Brichot, “that there used to be some famous waters near here. How do we know that?”

  “The name of the next station is one of a multitude of proofs. It is called Fervaches.”

  “I don’t undelstand what he’s talking about,” mumbled the Princess, as though she were saying to me out of kindness: “He’s rather a bore, isn’t he?”

  “Why, Princess, Fervaches means hot springs. Fervidae aquae. But to return to the young violinist,” Brichot went on, “I was quite forgetting, Cottard, to tell you the great news. Had you heard that our poor friend Dechambre, who used to be Mme Verdurin’s favourite pianist, has just died? It’s dreadful.”

  “He was still quite young,” replied Cottard, “but he must have had some trouble with his liver, there must have been something sadly wrong in that quarter, he’d been looking very queer indeed for a long time past.”

  “But he wasn’t as young as all that,” said Brichot. “In the days when Elstir and Swann used to come to Mme Verdurin’s, Dechambre had already made himself a reputation in Paris, and, what is remarkable, without having first received the baptism of success abroad. Ah! he was no follower of the Gospel according to St Barnum, that fellow.”

  “You must be
mistaken, he couldn’t have been going to Mme Verdurin’s at that time, he was still in the nursery.”

  “But, unless my old memory plays me false, I was under the impression that Dechambre used to play Vinteuil’s sonata for Swann when that clubman, being at odds with the aristocracy, had still no idea that he was one day to become the embourgeoised prince consort of our sainted Odette.”

  “That’s impossible. Vinteuil’s sonata wasn’t played at Mme Verdurin’s until long after Swann ceased to come there,” said the Doctor, for he was one of those people who work very hard and think they remember a great many things which they imagine to be useful, but forget many others, a condition which enables them to go into ecstasies over the memories of people who have nothing else to do. “You’re not doing justice to your learning, and yet you aren’t suffering from softening of the brain,” he added with a smile. Brichot agreed that he was mistaken.

  The train stopped. We were at La Sogne. The name stirred my curiosity. “How I should like to know what all these names mean,” I said to Cottard.

  “Ask M. Brichot, he may know, perhaps.”

  “Why, La Sogne is la Cicogne, Siconia,” replied Brichot, whom I was longing to interrogate about many other names.

  Forgetting her attachment to her “corner,” Mme Sherbatoff kindly offered to change places with me so that I might talk more easily with Brichot, whom I wanted to ask about other etymologies that interested me, and assured me that she did not mind in the least whether she travelled with her face to the engine, or her back to it, or standing, or anyhow. She remained on the defensive until she had discovered a newcomer’s intentions, but as soon as she had realised that these were friendly, she would do everything in her power to oblige. At length the train stopped at the station of Douville-Féterne, which being more or less equidistant from the villages of Féterne and Douville, bore for this reason both their names. “Good grief!” exclaimed Dr Cottard when we came to the barrier where the tickets were collected, pretending to have only just discovered his loss, “I can’t find my ticket, I must have lost it.” But the collector, taking off his cap, assured him that it did not matter and smiled respectfully. The Princess (giving instructions to the coachman, as though she were a sort of lady-in-waiting to Mme Verdurin, who, because of the Cambremers, had not been able to come to the station, as, for that matter, she rarely did) took me, and also Brichot, with herself in one of the carriages. The Doctor, Saniette and Ski got into the other.