h such agility were
a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing,
a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of
astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn't
possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all
that!"; Mme. de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical
education, beating time with her head--transformed for the nonce into
the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and rapidity of whose movements
from one shoulder to the other (performed with that look of wild
abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shews who is no longer able to
analyse his pain, nor anxious to master it, and says merely "I can't
help it") so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings caught
in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged to put straight the
bunch of black grapes which she had in her hair, though without any
interruption of her constantly accelerated motion. On the other side
(and a little way in front) of Mme. de Franquetot, was the Marquise de
Gallardon, absorbed in her favourite meditation, namely upon her own
kinship with the Guermantes family, from which she derived both publicly
and in private a good deal of glory no unmingled with shame, the most
brilliant ornaments of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her,
perhaps because she was just a tiresome old woman, or because she was a
scandalous old woman, or because she came of an inferior branch of the
family, or very possibly for no reason at all. When she found herself
seated next to some one whom she did not know, as she was at this moment
next to Mme. de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that
her own consciousness of her Guermantes connection could not be made
externally manifest in visible character like those which, in the
mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a
vertical column by the side of some Sacred Personage the words which he
is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact
that she had never received an invitation, or even call, from her young
cousin the Princesse des Laumes, during the six years that had already
elapsed since the latter's marriage. The thought filled her with
anger--and with pride; for, by virtue of having told everyone who
expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme. des Laumes's, that it
was because of the risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there--a
de