123
" At an age when Names, offering us the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other, to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name, it is not only to cities and ruins that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, nor is it only the physical world that they spangle with differences and people with marvels, it is the social world as well: so every historic house, every famous residence or palace, has its lady or its fairy, as forests have their spirits and rivers their deities. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
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" the Princess endeavored to make it plain, or, rather, to let it be thought, by a whole external play of sign language, that she did not consider herself superior to the people she was with. She treated each of them with the charming politeness with which well-bred people treat their inferiors and was continually trying to oblige by pushing back her chair to make more room, holding my gloves, offering me all the helpful attention that a middle-class person would frown upon but which is willingly bestowed by sovereign ladies or, instinctively and out of professional habit, by trusty servants. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way