In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [98]
Long before my break with her daughter, Mme Swann had said to me: “It’s all very well your coming to see Gilberte but I should like you to come sometimes for my sake, not to my ‘do’s,’ which would bore you because there’s such a crowd, but on the other days, when you will always find me at home if you come fairly late.” So that I might be thought, when I came to see her, to be belatedly complying with a wish that she had expressed in the past. And very late in the afternoon, when it was already dark, almost at the hour at which my parents would be sitting down to dinner, I would set out to pay Mme Swann a visit during the course of which I knew that I should not see Gilberte and yet should be thinking only of her. In that quarter, then looked upon as remote, of a Paris darker than it is today, where even in the centre there was no electric light in the public thoroughfares and very little in private houses, the lamps of a drawing-room situated on the ground floor or a low mezzanine (as were the rooms in which Mme Swann generally received her visitors) were enough to lighten the street and to make the passer-by raise his eyes and connect with the glow from the windows, as with its apparent though veiled cause, the presence outside the door of a string of smart broughams. This passer-by was led to believe, not without a certain excitement, that a modification had been effected in this mysterious cause, when he saw one of the carriages begin to move; but it was merely a coachman who, afraid that his horses might catch cold, started them now and again on a brisk walk, all the more impressive because the rubber-tired wheels gave the sound of their hooves a background of silence from which it stood out more distinct and more explicit.
The “winter-garden,” of which in those days the passer-by generally caught a glimpse, in whatever street he might be walking, if the apartment did not stand too high above the pavement, is to be seen today only in photogravures in the gift-books of P. J. Stahl, where, in contrast to the infrequent floral decorations of the Louis XVI drawing-rooms now in fashion—a single rose or a Japanese iris in a long-necked vase of crystal into which it would be impossible to squeeze a second—it seems, because of the profusion of indoor plants which people had then, and of the absolute lack of stylisation in their arrangement, as though it must have responded in the ladies whose houses it adorned to some lively and delightful passion for botany rather than to any cold concern for lifeless decoration. It suggested to one, only on a larger scale, in the houses of those days, those tiny, portable hothouses laid out on New Year’s morning beneath the lighted lamp—for the children were always too impatient to wait for daylight—among all the other New Year presents but the loveliest of them all, consoling them, with its real plants which they could tend as they grew, for the bareness of the winter soil; and even more than those little houses themselves, those winter gardens were like the hothouse that the children could see there at the same time, portrayed in a delightful book, another New Year present and one which, for all that it was given not to them but to Mlle Lili, the heroine of the story, enchanted them to such a pitch that even now, when they are almost old men and women, they ask themselves whether, in those fortunate years, winter was not the loveliest of the seasons. And finally, beyond the winter-garden, through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear