In this third volume the narrator, now a young man, moves with his family to an apartment beside the Paris home of the Guermantes, an ancient aristocratic family whose name had long enchanted him. He sets out to enter their circle, pursuing the glamorous Duchesse de Guermantes, and gradually wins access to the salons of high society. What he finds is both dazzling and disappointing, full of wit, snobbery and cruelty. The book also follows his grandmother's illness and the political stir of the Dreyfus affair. It is a comic and moving study of social prestige and its illusions.
Quotes
Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years' time.