Sazerat" or "than Mlle. Vinteuil," as though she had been in any way
comparable with them. And my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue
eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might have
reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I
admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: "How lovely she is! What
true nobility! it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of
Genevieve de Brabant, that I have before me!" And the care which I took to
focus all my attention upon her face succeeded in isolating it so
completely that to-day, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I find
it impossible to visualise any single person who was present except her,
and the beadle who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether
the lady was, indeed, Mme. de Guermantes. But her, I can see her still
quite clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the
sacristy, lighted by the intermittent, hot sunshine of a windy and rainy
day, where Mme. de Guermantes found herself in the midst of all those
Combray people whose names, even, she did not know, but whose inferiority
proclaimed her own supremacy so loud that she must, in return, feel for
them a genuine, pitying sympathy, and whom she might count on impressing
even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and natural charm.
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