Mme de Cambremer (née Legrandin)

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Legrandin’s sister, married into a name the Guermantes do not rate: the lowest standing of anyone here, and falling, in scenes that ridicule her from Saint-Euverte’s to Balbec.

Mme de Cambremer is Renée Legrandin, the sister her brother would not introduce to the narrator’s family, married into provincial nobility and spending the rest of the novel trying to make Cambremer mean what Guermantes means. It never does. She first appears at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s as a “petite Mme de Cambremer” nobody can place, the duchesse later mocks her as bovine and pretentious, and at Balbec she is the modern-music snob who will not admit to liking Poussin until she hears that Degas does. Her scenes on this page are low and gain only a little across the book. Her standing is the lowest of any character here and declines further, to its lowest point after Albertine’s death. Belonging is barely staged. She is her brother’s snobbery told from the other side, and the readings treat her as the novel does: a name inside the aristocracy and a woman who never is.