n I saw Mme. Swann on foot, in a
'polonaise' of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a
pheasant's wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the
Allee des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her
own house, and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy of the
gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure at a distance, were
raising their hats to her and saying to one another that there was never
anyone so well turned out as she. But instead of simplicity it was to
ostentation that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled
Francoise, who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs
were 'giving' beneath her, to stroll up and down with me for another
hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte Dauphine, figuring for
me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as
no real Queen has ever since been able to give me, because my notion of
their power has been less vague, and more founded upon experience--borne
along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender and shapely as
one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an
enormous coachman, furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive
groom, like Toby, "the late Beaudenord's tiger," I saw--or rather I
felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab--a
matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme
modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, deep down
in which lay negligently back Mme. Swann, her hair, now quite pale with
one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from
which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips
an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension
of Majesty, though it was pre-eminently the enticing smile of the
courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who bowed to her.
That smile was, in reality, saying to one: "Oh yes, I do remember, quite
well; it was wonderful!" to another: "How I should have loved to! We
were unfortunate!", to a third: "Yes, if you like! I must just keep in
the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away." When
strangers passed she still allowed to linger about her lips a lazy
smile, as though she expected or remembered some friend, which made them
say: "What a lovely woman!". And for certain men only she had a sour,
strained, shy, cold smile w