In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [112]
If, at the moment of leaving Mme Swann, when her tea-party ended, I was thinking of what I was going to write to her daughter, Mme Cottard, as she departed, had been filled with thoughts of a wholly different kind. On her little “tour of inspection” she had not failed to congratulate Mme Swann on the new furnishings, the recent “acquisitions” which caught the eye in her drawing-room. She could also see among them some, though only a very few, of the things that Odette had had in the old days in the Rue La Pérouse, for instance her animals carved in precious stones, her mascots.
For since Mme Swann had picked up from a friend whose opinion she valued the word “trashy”—which had opened to her new horizons because it denoted precisely those things which a few years earlier she had considered “smart”—all those things had, one after another, followed into retirement the gilded trellis that had served as background to her chrysanthemums, innumerable bonbonnières from Giroux’s, and the coroneted note-paper (not to mention the coins of gilt pasteboard littered about on the mantelpieces, which, even before she had come to know Swann, a man of taste had advised her to jettison). Moreover in the artistic disorder, the studio-like jumble of the rooms, whose walls were still painted in sombre colours which made them as different as possible from the white-enamelled drawing-rooms Mme Swann was to favour a little later, the Far East was retreating more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth century; and the cushions which, to make me “comfortable,” Mme Swann heaped up and buffeted into position behind my back were sprinkled with Louis XV garlands and not, as of old, with Chinese dragons. In the room in which she was usually to be found, and of which she would say, “Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn’t live with a lot of hostile, pompous things; this is where I do my work” (though she never stated precisely at what she was working, whether a picture, or perhaps a book, for the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to do something, not to be quite useless), she was surrounded by Dresden pieces (having a fancy for that sort of porcelain, which she pronounced with an English accent, saying in any connexion: “How pretty that is; it reminds me of Dresden flowers”), and dreaded for them even more than in the old days for her grotesque figures and her vases the ignorant handling of her servants who were made to expiate the anxiety that they had caused her by submitting to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most courteous and considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked. Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming. Nowadays it was rarely in Japanese kimonos that Odette received her intimates, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau housecoat whose flowering foam she would make as though to rub gently over her bosom, and in which she basked, lolled, disported herself with such an air of well-being, of cool freshness, taking such deep breaths, that she seemed to look on these garments not as something decorative, a mere setting for herself, but as necessary, in the same way as her “tub” or her daily “constitutional,” to satisfy the requirements of her physiognomy and the niceties of hygiene. She used often to say that she would go without bread