"At the age when Names, offering us an image of the unknowable which we have poured into their mould, while at the same moment connoting for us also a real place, force us accordingly to identify one with the other to such a point that we set out to seek in a city for a soul which it cannot enshrine but which we have no longer the power to expel from its name, it is not only to towns and rivers that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, it is not only the physical universe which they speckle with differences, people with marvels, it is the social universe also; and so every historic house, in town or country, has its lady or its fairy, as every forest has its genie, every stream its deity. Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its name, the fairy is transformed to suit the life of our imagination, by which she lives; thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme de Guermantes existed in me, after having been for years no more than the reflection of a magic lantern slide and of a strained glass window, began to lose its colours when quite other dreams impregnated it with the bubbling coolness of swift-flowing streams.
However, the fairy languishes if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds, for the name then begins to reflect that person, who contains nothing of the fairy; the fairy may revive if we absent ourselves from the person, but if we remain in the person's presence the fairy ultimately dies and with her the name, as happened to the family of Lusignan which was fated to become extinct on the day when the fairy Melusine should disappear. Then the Name, beneath the successive 'retouchings' of which we may end by finding the original handsome portrait of a strange woman whom we have never met, becomes no more than the mere identity card photograph to which we refer in order to decide whether we know, whether or not we ought to bow to a person who passes us in the street."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 4-5
Proust reintroduces Mme de Guermantes, who plays a big role in this volume, and whom we'll revisit in much greater detail soon. In the process of bringing Mme de Guermantes back into the story Proust touches upon one of this themes: the difference between the mythology surrounding a person, our heightened perception of them, and the reality. Names, like famous houses or frightening woods, contain fairies. "However, the fairy languishes if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds, for the same then begins to reflect that person, who contains nothing of the fairy, the fairy may revive if we absent ourselves from the person, but if we remain in the person's presence the fairy ultimately dies and with her the name . . ." The legend of Melusine must have had an impact on the young scholarly Proust, and one wonders if she played a role in the bedtime stories that he always waited for his mother to read to him. This is the second time that he compared a character from the novel to Melusine. There are different versions of her legend, and she's described as being a mermaid, or at least something like a mermaid, although sometimes only part of the time. A central part of the story relates to a man breaking his oath to not disturb his wife, a fairy (although he doesn't know it), while in her bath, and the disastrous consequences that ensue from his crime. It happens twice in the legend, and after having been married for twenty-four years I can attest that it is a grave crime. I think that Proust is right in his view that fairies, both good and bad, exist in names, which is why we sometimes can't use the actual name of an ex-lover because just the name itself is too painful, so they exist as nicknames. That said, I find that I can never refer to my ex-wife Brenda as anything other than Brenda, and could certainly never call her simply "the Ex." Somehow that just seems disrespectful, although I suspect that she refers to me, quite rightly, by all sorts of juicy terms. I remember when she changed the name associated with my contact information in her phone to Don Draper, which I don't think was a positive comment on me as a business success story.
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