By this time my grandmother had reappeared, and we all set out together. Saint-Loup's uncle declined to honour me not only with a word, with so much as a look, even, in my direction. If he stared strangers out of countenance (and during this short excursion he two or three times hurled his terrible and searching scrutiny like a sounding lead at insignificant people of obviously humble extraction who happened to pass), to make up for that he never for a moment, if I was to judge by myself, looked at the people whom he did know, just as a detective on special duty might except his personal friends from his professional vigilance. Leaving them, my grandmother, Mme. de Villeparisis and him to talk to one another, I fell behind with Saint-Loup. "Tell me, am I right in thinking I heard Mme. de Villeparisis say just now to your uncle that he was a Guermantes?" "Of course he is; Palamède de Guermantes." "Not the same Guermantes who have a place near Combray, and claim descent from Geneviève de Brabant?" "Most certainly: my uncle, who is the very last word in heraldry and all that sort of thing, would tell you that our 'cry', our war-cry, that is to say, which was changed afterwards to 'Passavant' was originally 'Combraysis'," he said, smiling so as not to appear to be priding himself on this prerogative of a "cry", which only the semi-royal houses, the great chiefs of feudal bands enjoyed. "It's his brother who has the place now." And so she was indeed related, and quite closely, to the Guermantes, this Mme. de Villeparisis who had so long been for me the lady who had given me a duck filled with chocolates, when I was little, more remote then from the Guermantes way than if she had been shut up somewhere on the Méséglise, less brilliant, less highly placed by me than was the Combray optician, and who now suddenly went through one of those fantastic rises in value, parallel to the depreciations, no less unforeseen, of other objects in our possession, which--rise and fall alike--introduce in our youth and in those periods of our life in which a trace of youth persists changes as numerous as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. "Haven't they got, down there, the busts of all the old lords of Guermantes?" "Yes; and a lovely sight they are!" Saint-Loup was ironical. "Between you and me, I look on all that sort of thing as rather a joke. But they have got at Guermantes, what is a little more interesting, and that is quite a touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière. It's as fine as Whistler or Velasquez," went on Saint-Loup, who in his neophyte zeal was not always very exact about degrees of greatness. "There are also some moving pictures by Gustave Moreau. My aunt is the niece of your friend Mme. de Villeparisis; she was brought up by her, and married her cousin, who was a nephew, too, of my aunt Villeparisis, the present Duc de Guermantes." "Then who is this uncle?"