In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [99]
like the glass front of one of those children’s playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock-coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar—then a recent importation—with steam which may escape from it still today, but to which, if it does, we have grown so accustomed now that no one notices it. Mme Swann attached great importance to her “tea”; she thought that she showed her originality and expressed her charm when she said to a man: “You’ll find me at home any day, fairly late; come to tea,” and so would accompany with a sweet and subtle smile these words which she pronounced with a fleeting trace of an English accent, and which her listener duly noted, bowing solemnly in acknowledgment, as though the invitation had been something important and uncommon which commanded deference and required attention. There was another reason, apart from those given already, for the flowers’ having more than a merely ornamental significance in Mme Swann’s drawing-room, and this reason pertained not to the period but, in some degree, to the life that Odette had formerly led. A great courtesan, such as she had been, lives largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time to live for her home. The things that one sees in the house of a respectable woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan. The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for society, but that in which she undresses herself for a man. She must be as elegant in her dressing-gown, in her night-dress, as in her outdoor attire. Other women display their jewels, but she lives in the intimacy of her pearls. This kind of existence imposes on her the obligation, and ends by giving her the taste, for a luxury which is secret, that is to say which comes near to being disinterested. Mme Swann extended this to include her flowers. There was always beside her chair an immense crystal bowl filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long white daisy-petals floating in the water, which seemed to testify, in the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite occupation now interrupted, as would also have been the cup of tea which Mme Swann might have been drinking there alone for her own pleasure; an occupation more intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that one wanted to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed there by her side, as one would have apologised for looking at the title of the still open book which would have revealed to one Odette’s recent reading and hence perhaps her present thoughts. And even more than the book, the flowers were living things; one was embarrassed, when one entered the room to pay Mme Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her, not to find the room empty, so enigmatic a place, intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume, those flowers which had not been arranged for Odette’s visitors but, as it were forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again intimate talks which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in vain to read by staring at the washed-out, liquid, mauve and dissolute colour of the Parma violets. From the end of October Odette would begin to come home with the utmost punctuality for tea (which was still known at that time as “five-o’clock tea”) having once heard it said, and being fond of repeating, that if Mme Verdurin had been able to form a salon it was because people were always certain of finding her at home at the same hour. She imagined that she herself had one also, of the same kind, but freer, senza rigore as she liked to say. She saw herself figuring thus as a sort of Lespinasse, and believed