Albertine never related facts that were capable of injuring her, but always other facts which could be explained only by them, the truth being rather a current which flows from what people say to us, and which we apprehend, invisible as it may be, than the actual thing that they say. And so when I assured her that a woman whom she had known at Vichy had a bad reputation, she swore to me that this woman was not at all what I supposed, and had never attempted to make her do anything improper. But she added, another day, when I was speaking of my curiosity as to people of that sort, that the Vichy lady had a friend, whom she, Albertine, did not know, but whom the lady had ‘promised to introduce to her.’ That she should have promised her this, could only mean that Albertine wished it, or that the lady had known that by offering the introduction she would be giving her pleasure.
But if I had pointed this out to Albertine, I should have appeared to be depending for my information upon her, I should have put an end to it at once, I should never have learned anything more, I should have ceased to make myself feared. Besides, we were at Balbec, the Vichy lady and her friend lived at Menton; the remoteness, the impossibility of the danger made short work of my suspicions. Often when M. de Cambremer hailed me from the station I had been with Albertine making the most of the darkness, and with all the more difficulty as she had been inclined to resist, fearing that it was not dark enough.
“You know, I’m sure Cottard saw us, anyhow, if he didn’t, he must have noticed how breathless we were from our voices, just when they were talking about your other kind of breathlessness,” Albertine said to me when we arrived at the Douville station where we were to take the little train home. But this homeward, like the outward journey, if, by giving me a certain poetical feeling, it awakened in me the desire to travel, to lead a new life, and so made me decide to abandon any intention of marrying Albertine, and even to break off our relations finally, also, and by the very fact of their contradictory nature, made this bleach more easy.
For, on the homeward journey just as much as on the other, at every station there joined us in the train or greeted us from the platform people whom we knew; the furtive pleasures of the imagination were outweighed by those other, continual pleasures of sociability which are so soothing, so soporific. Already, before the stations themselves, their names (which had suggested so many fancies to me since the day on which I first heard them, the evening on which I travelled down to Balbec with my grandmother), had grown human, had lost their strangeness since the evening when Brichot, at Albertine’s request, had given us a more complete account of their etymology.
I had been charmed by the ‘flower’ that ended certain names, such as Fiquefleur, Ronfleur, Fiers, Barfleur, Harfleur, etc., and amused by the.’beef that comes at the end of Bricqueboeuf. But the flower vanished, and also the beef, when Brichot (and this he had told me on the first day in the train) informed us that fleur means a harbour (like fiord), and that boeuf, in Norman budh, means a hut.
As he cited a number of examples, what had appeared to me a particular instance became general, Bricqueboeuf took its place by the side of Elbeuf, and indeed in a name that was at first sight as individual as the place itself, like the name Pennedepie, in which the obscurities most impossible for the mind to elucidate seemed to me to have been amalgamated from time immemorial in a word as coarse, savoury and hard as a certain Norman cheese, I was disappointed to find the Gallic pen which means mountain and is as recognisable in Pennemarck as in the Apennines.
As at each halt of the train I felt that we should have friendly hands to shake if not visitors to receive in our carriage, I said to Albertine:
“Hurry up and ask Brichot about the names you want to know. You mentioned to me Mar-couville l’Orgueilleuse.” “Yes, I love that orgueil, it’s a proud village,” said Albertine. “You would find it,” Brichot replied, “prouder still if, instead of turning it into French or even adopting a low Latinity, as we find in the Cartulary of the Bishop of Bayeux, Marcouvilla superba, you were to take the older form, more akin to the Norman, Marculplinvilla superba, the village, the domain of Merculph.
In almost all these names which end in ville, you might see still marshalled upon this coast, the phantoms of the rude Norman invaders. At Hermenonville, you had, standing by the carriage door, only our excellent Doctor, who, obviously, has nothing of the Nordic chief about him. But, by shutting your eyes, ypu might have seen the illustrious Hérimund (Herimundivilla). Although I can never understand why people choose those roads, between Loigny and Balbec-Plage, rather than the very picturesque roads that lead from Loigny to Old Balbec, Mme. Verdurin has perhaps taken you out that way in her carriage. If so, you have seen Incarville, or the village of Wiscar; and Tourville, before you come to Mme. Verdurin’s, is the village of Turold. And besides, there were not only the Normans. It seems that the Germans (Alemanni) came as far as here: Aumenancourt, Alemanicurtis–don’t let us speak of it to that young officer I see there; he would be capable of refusing to visit his cousins there any more.
There were also Saxons, as is proved by the springs of Sissonne” (the goal of one of Mme. Verdurin’s favourite excursions, and quite rightly), “just as in England you have Middlesex, Wessex. And what is inexplicable, it seems that the Goths, miserable wretches as they are said to have been, came as far as this, and even the Moors, for Mortagne comes from Mauretania. Their trace has remained at Gourville–Gothorunvilla. Some vestige of the Latins subsists also, Lagny (Latiniacum).” “What I should like to have is an explanation of Thorpehomme,” said M. de Charlus. “I understand homme,” he added, at which the sculptor and Cottard exchanged significant glances. “But Thorpe?” “Homme does not in the least mean what you are naturally led to suppose, Baron,” replied Brichot, glancing maliciously at Cottard and the sculptor. “Homme has nothing to do, in this instance, with the sex to which I am not indebted for my mother. Homme is holm which means a small island, etc….
As for Thorpe, or village, we find that in a hundred words with which I have already bored our young friend. Thus in Thorpehomme there is not the name of a Norman chief, but words of the Norman language. You see how the whole of this country has been Germanised.” “I think that is an exaggeration,” said M. de Charlus. “Yesterday I was at Orgeville.” “This time I give you back the man I took from you in Thorpehomme, Baron. Without wishing to be pedantic, a Charter of Robert I gives us, for Orgeville, Otgervilla, the domain of Otger. All these names are those of ancient lords. Octeville la Venelle is a corruption of l’Avenel. The Avenels were a family of repute in the middle ages.
Bour-guenolles, where Mme. Verdurin took us the other day, used to be written Bourg de Môles, for that village belonged in the eleventh century to Baudoin de Môles, as also did la Chaise-Baudoin, but here we are at Doncières.” “Heavens, look at all these subalterns trying to get in,” said M. de Charlus with feigned alarm. “I am thinking of you, for it doesn’t affect me, I am getting out here.” “You hear, Doctor?” said Brichot. “The Baron is afraid of officers passing over his body. And yet they have every right to appear here in their strength, for Doncières is precisely the same as Saint-Cyr, Dominus Cyriacus. There are plenty of names of towns in which Sanctus and Sancta are replaced by Dominus and Domina. Besides, this peaceful military town has sometimes a false air of Saint-Cyr, of Versailles, and even of Fontainebleau.”
During these homeward (as on the outward) journeys I used to tell Albertine to put on her things, for I knew very well that at Aumenancourt, Doncières, Epreville, Saint-Vast we should be receiving brief visits from friends. Nor did I at all object to these, when they took the form of (at Hermenonville—the domain of Herimund) a visit from M. de Chevregny, seizing the opportunity, when he had come down to meet other guests, of asking me to come over to luncheon next day at Beausoleil, or (at Doncières) the sudden irruption of one of Saint-Loup’s charming friends sent by him (if he himself was not free) to convey to me an invitation from Captain de Borodino, from the officers’ mess at the Cocq-Hardi, or the serjeants’ at the Faisan Doré. If Saint-Loup often came in person, during the whole of
