QUOTE : What Mme de Guermantes believed to be disappointing my expectations was on the contrary what in the end—for the Duc and the general went on relentlessly with their discussion of pedigree—saved my evening from being a complete disappointment. How could I have felt other than disappointed until now? All of the dinner guests, cloaking the mysterious names under which I had merely known and imagined them at a distance in bodies and minds similar or inferior to those of everyone else I knew, had given me the impression of a commonplace dullness which the initial view of the Danish port of Elsinore would give to any passionate admirer of Hamlet.