In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [20]
At first there were only vague shadows, in which one suddenly caught—like the gleam of a precious stone which one cannot see—the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes, or, like a medallion of Henri IV on a dark background, the bent profile of the Duc d’Aumale, to whom an invisible lady was exclaiming “Your Royal Highness must allow me to take his coat,” to which the prince replied, “Oh, come, come! Really, Madame d’Ambresac.” She took it, in spite of this vague demurral, and was envied by one and all for being thus honoured.
But in the other boxes, almost everywhere, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves. Beyond began the orchestra stalls, abode of mortals for ever separated from the sombre and transparent realm to which here and there, in their smooth liquid surface, the limpid, reflecting eyes of the water-goddesses served as frontier. For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced. Within the boundaries of their domain, however, the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of rock crystal. They leaned towards these creatures, offering them sweetmeats; from time to time the flood parted to admit a new nereid who, belated, smiling, apologetic, had just floated into blossom out of the shadowy depths; then, the act ended, having no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of earth which had drawn them to the surface, plunging back all at once, the several sisters vanished into the night. But of all these retreats to the thresholds of which their frivolous desire to behold the works of man brought the curious goddesses who let none approach them, the most famous was the cube of semi-darkness known to the world as the stage box of the Princesse de Guermantes.
Like a tall goddess presiding from afar over the frolics of the lesser deities, the Princess had deliberately remained somewhat in the background on a sofa placed sideways in the box, red as a coral reef, beside a large vitreous expanse which was probably a mirror and suggested a section, perpendicular, opaque and liquid, cut by a ray of sunlight in the dazzling crystal of the sea. At once plume and corolla, like certain subaqueous growths, a great white flower, downy as the wing of a bird, hung down from the Princess’s forehead along one of her cheeks, the curve of which it followed with coquettish, amorous, vibrant suppleness, as if half enclosing it like a pink egg in the softness of a halcyon’s nest. Over her hair, reaching in front to her eyebrows and caught back lower down at the level of her throat, was spread a net composed of those little white shells which are fished up in certain southern seas and which were intermingled with pearls, a marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and at moments plunged back again into a darkness in the depths of which