though under different forms, and sacrificing, if not to self-esteem, at any rate to certain inculcated principles or mental habits, the disturbing thrill of being involved in an unfamiliar way of life. Of course the microcosm in which the old lady isolated herself was not poisoned with virulent rancour, as was the group in which the wives of the notary and the judge sat sneering with rage. It was indeed embalmed with a delicate and old-world fragrance which, however, was no less artificial. For at heart the old lady would probably have discovered, in attracting, in attaching to herself (and, in doing so, renewing herself) the mysterious sympathy of new people, a charm which is altogether lacking from the pleasure that is to be derived from mixing only with the people of one’s own world, and reminding oneself that, this being the best of all possible worlds, the ill-informed contempt of others may be disregarded. Perhaps she felt that if she arrived incognito at the Grand Hotel, Balbec, she would, in her black woollen dress and old-fashioned bonnet, bring a smile to the lips of some old reprobate, who from the depths of his rocking chair would glance up and murmur, “What a scarecrow!” or, still worse, to those of some worthy man who had, like the judge, kept between his pepper-and-salt whiskers a fresh complexion and a pair of sparkling eyes such as she liked to see, and who would at once bring the magnifying lens of the conjugal glasses to bear upon so quaint a phenomenon; and perhaps it was in unconscious apprehension of those first few minutes which one knows will be brief but which are none the less dreaded—like one’s first header into the sea—that this lady sent a servant down in advance to inform the hotel of the personality and habits of his mistress, and, cutting short the manager’s greetings with an abruptness in which there was more shyness than pride, made straight for her room, where her own curtains, replacing those that draped the hotel windows, her own screens and photographs, set up so effectively between her and the outside world, to which otherwise she would have had to adapt herself, the barrier of her private life and habits, that it was her home (in the cocoon of which she had remained) that travelled rather than herself.
Thenceforward, having placed, between herself on the one hand and the hotel staff and the tradesmen on the other, her own servants who bore instead of her the shock of contact with all this strange humanity and kept up the familiar atmosphere around their mistress, having set her prejudices between herself and the other visitors, indifferent whether or not she gave offence to people whom her friends would not have had in their houses, it was in her own world that she continued to live, by correspondence with her friends, by memories, by her intimate awareness of her own position, the quality of her manners, the adroitness of her courtesy. And every day, when she came downstairs to go for a drive in her own carriage, the lady’s-maid who came after her carrying her wraps, and the footman who preceded her, seemed like sentries who, at the gate of an embassy, flying the flag of the country to which she belonged, assured to her upon foreign soil the privilege of extra-territoriality. She did not leave her room until the middle of the afternoon on the day after our arrival, so that we did not see her in the dining-room, into which the manager, since we were newcomers, conducted us at the lunch hour, taking us under his wing, as a corporal takes a squad of recruits to the master-tailor to have them fitted; we did however see a moment later a country squire and his daughter, of an obscure but very ancient Breton family, M. and Mlle de Stermaria, whose table had been allotted to us in the belief that they had gone out and would not be back until the evening. Having come to Balbec only to see various owners of manors whom they knew in that neighbourhood, they spent in the hotel dining-room, what with the invitations they accepted and the visits they paid, only such time as was strictly unavoidable.