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" And I, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavière, and Condé my notions of the life and thoughts of the two cousins (something I could no longer do from their faces, now that I had seen them), would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world. For in the critic’s opinion I would have found merely intelligence, intelligence superior to my own but of the same kind. But the opinion of the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which would have furnished me with invaluable facts about the nature of these two poetic creatures, was something I imagined through the power of their names and credited with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and longing of a man in a fever, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should restore to me was the charm of the summer afternoons I had spent on walks along the Guermantes way. "

Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way


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Marcel Proust quote : And I, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavière, and Condé my notions of the life and thoughts of the two cousins (something I could no longer do from their faces, now that I had seen them), would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world. For in the critic’s opinion I would have found merely intelligence, intelligence superior to my own but of the same kind. But the opinion of the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which would have furnished me with invaluable facts about the nature of these two poetic creatures, was something I imagined through the power of their names and credited with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and longing of a man in a fever, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should restore to me was the charm of the summer afternoons I had spent on walks along the Guermantes way.