Nor could we ever reach that goal to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in his window, where he passed from cabbage green when I was dipping my fingers in the holy-water stoup, to plum-blue when I had reached our row of chairs; or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the resounding syllable _antes_. And if in spite of that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons. Is there any wonder that this young poet—and he was very young—when first he meets the Duchess in real life, and is welcomed into the select circle of her friends, should feel tremendously excited? But snob is not the right word. As a fact, of course, what these complainants have missed is the use to which this aristocratic circle has been put in the life-history of the hero. For Proust, like any writer that can be read over and over again, has stamped his work through and through with his own peculiarly coloured personal psychology. And if there is one theme that is being insistently played throughout the whole work (like Swann’s and Odette’s phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), in incident after incident, in the adventures of one character after another, it is that theme of sadness that no ideal state is attainable in this world, not so much because we cannot climb, nor even because the ideal becomes illusion on attainment, but because the object to which we attach our ideal is, of necessity, not seen as it really is, but always as we long for it to be. This, with its complement that the mere fact of not being able to possess may lead to desire even when the object in itself does not seem very desirable, is at the very heart of Proust’s philosophy.