In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [100]
that she had founded a rival salon by taking from the du Deffand of the little group several of her most attractive men, notably Swann himself, who had followed her in her secession and into her retirement, according to a version for which one can understand that she had succeeded in gaining credit among newcomers who were ignorant of the past, though without convincing herself. But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten. On days when Mme Swann had not left the house, one found her in a crêpe-de-Chine dressing-gown, white as the first snows of winter, or, it might be, in one of those long pleated chiffon garments, which looked like nothing so much as a shower of pink or white petals, and would be regarded today as highly inappropriate for winter—though quite wrongly, for these light fabrics and soft colours gave to a woman—in the stifling warmth of the drawing-rooms of those days, with their heavily curtained doors, rooms of which the most elegant thing that the society novelists of the time could find to say was that they were “cosily padded”—the same air of coolness that they gave to the roses which were able to stay in the room there beside her, despite the winter, in the glowing flesh tints of their nudity, as though it were already spring. Because of the muffling of all sound by the carpets, and of her withdrawal into a recess, the lady of the house, not being apprised of your entry as she is today, would continue to read almost until you were standing before her chair, which enhanced still further that sense of the romantic, that charm as of detecting a secret, which we can recapture today in the memory of those gowns, already out of fashion even then, which Mme Swann was perhaps alone in not having discarded, and which give us the feeling that the woman who wore them must have been the heroine of a novel because most of us have scarcely set eyes on them outside the pages of certain of Henry Gréville’s novels. Odette had now in her drawing-room, at the beginning of winter, chrysanthemums of enormous size and of a variety of colours such as Swann, in the old days, certainly never saw in her drawing-room in the Rue La Pérouse. My admiration for them—when I went to pay Mme Swann one of those melancholy visits during which, prompted by my sorrow, I discovered in her all the mysterious poetry of her character as the mother of that Gilberte to whom she would say next day: “Your friend came to see me yesterday”—sprang, no doubt, from my sense that, pale pink like the Louis XV silk that covered her chairs, snow-white like her crêpe-de-Chine dressing-gown, or of a metallic red like her samovar, they superimposed upon the decoration of the room another, a supplementary scheme of decoration, as rich and as delicate in its colouring, but one that was alive and would last for a few days only. But I was touched to find that these chrysanthemums appeared not so much ephemeral as relatively durable compared with the tones, equally pink or equally coppery, which the setting sun so gorgeously displays amid the mists of a November afternoon, and which, after seeing them fading from the sky before I had entered the house, I found again inside, prolonged, transposed in the flaming palette of the flowers. Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that tea-time hour the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendour they set ablaze all around me. Alas, it was not in the conversations which I heard that I could hope to attain to that splendour; they had little in common with it. Even with Mme Cottard, and although it was growing late, Mme Swann would assume her most caressing manner to