In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [114]
Except at these moments of involuntary relaxation in which Swann sought to recapture the melancholy Botticellian droop, Odette’s body seemed now to be cut out in a single silhouette wholly confined within a “line” which, following the contours of the woman, had abandoned the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the reticulations, the elaborate dispersions of the fashions of former days, but also, where it was her anatomy that went wrong by making unnecessary digressions within or without the ideal form traced for it, was able to rectify, by a bold stroke, the errors of nature, to make good, along a whole section of its course, the lapses of the flesh as well as of the material. The pads, the preposterous “bustle” had disappeared, as well as those tailed bodices which, overlapping the skirt and stiffened by rods of whalebone, had so long amplified Odette with an artificial stomach and had given her the appearance of being composed of several disparate pieces which there was no individuality to bind together. The vertical fall of the fringes, the curve of the ruches had made way for the inflexion of a body which made silk palpitate as a siren stirs the waves and gave to cambric a human expression, now that it had been liberated, like an organic and living form, from the long chaos and nebulous envelopment of fashions at last dethroned. But Mme Swann had chosen, had contrived to preserve some vestiges of certain of these, in the very midst of those that had supplanted them. When, in the evening, finding myself unable to work and knowing that Gilberte had gone to the theatre with friends, I paid a surprise visit to her parents, I used often to find Mme Swann in an elegant dishabille the skirt of which, of one of those rich dark colours, blood-red or orange, which seemed to have a special meaning because they were no longer in fashion, was crossed diagonally, though not concealed, by a broad band of black lace which recalled the flounces of an earlier day. When, on a still chilly afternoon in spring, she had taken me (before my break with her daughter) to the Zoo, under her jacket, which she opened or buttoned up according as the exercise made her feel warm, the dog-toothed edging of her blouse suggested a glimpse of the lapel of some non-existent waistcoat such as she had been accustomed to wear some years earlier, when she had liked their edges to have the same slight indentations; and her scarf—of that same “tartan” to which she had remained faithful, but whose tones she had so far softened, red becoming pink and blue lilac, that one might almost have taken it for one of those pigeon’s-breast taffetas which were the latest novelty—was knotted in such a way under her chin, without one’s being able to make out where it was fastened, that one was irresistibly reminded of those bonnet-strings which were now no longer worn. She need only “hold out” like this for a little longer and young men attempting to understand her theory of dress would say: “Mme Swann is quite a period in herself, isn’t she?” As in a fine literary style which superimposes different forms but is strengthened by a tradition that lies concealed behind them, so in Mme Swann’s attire those half-tinted memories of waistcoats or of ringlets, sometimes a tendency, at once repressed, towards the “all aboard,” or even a distant and vague allusion to the “follow-me-lad,” kept alive beneath the concrete form the unfinished likeness of other, older forms which one would not have been able to find effectively reproduced by the milliner or the dressmaker, but about which one’s thoughts incessantly hovered, and enveloped Mme Swann in a sort of nobility—perhaps because the very uselessness of these fripperies made them seem designed to serve some more than utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the traces they preserved of vanished years, or else because of