“Orange-colored envelope”

Mme de Guermantes: the narrator seeks to know “the mystery of her name,” which is not to be discerned when he sees her leaving her house or riding in her carriage.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

I love the way what “my father’s friend had said” becomes, “after all,” the measure of objectivity. Proust is unsparingly comic in his presentation of a younger self.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)