In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [22]
“That fat fellow is the Marquis de Ganançay,” came in a knowing tone from the man next to me, who had not quite caught the name whispered in the row behind.
The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, moved slowly around in the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, venerable, wheezing, moss-grown, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath. No one aroused in me so much envy as he, on account of his apparent familiarity with this box and the indifference with which he allowed the Princess to hold out to him her box of sweets, throwing him as she did so a glance from her fine eyes, cut from a diamond which at such moments intelligence and friendliness seemed to liquefy, whereas, when they were in repose, reduced to their purely material beauty, to their mineral brilliance alone, if the least reflected light displaced them ever so slightly, they set the depths of the pit ablaze with their inhuman, horizontal and resplendent fires. But now, because the act of Phèdre in which Berma was playing was due to start, the Princess came to the front of the box; whereupon, as if she herself were a theatrical apparition, in the different zone of light which she traversed, I saw not only the colour but the material of her adornments change. And in the box, now drained dry, emergent, no longer a part of the watery realm, the Princess, ceasing to be a nereid, appeared turbaned in white and blue like some marvellous tragic actress dressed for the part of Zaïre, or perhaps of Orosmane; then, when she had taken her place in the front row, I saw that the halcyon’s nest which tenderly shielded the pearly pink of her cheeks was an immense bird of paradise, soft, glittering and velvety.
But now my gaze was diverted from the Princesse de Guermantes’s box by an ill-dressed, plain little woman who came in, her eyes ablaze with indignation, followed by two young men, and sat down a few seats away from me. Then the curtain rose. I could not help being saddened by the reflexion that there remained now no trace of my former predispositions in regard to Berma and the dramatic art, at the time when, in order to miss nothing of the extraordinary phenomenon which I would have gone to the ends of the earth to see, I kept my mind prepared like the sensitive plates which astronomers take out to Africa or the West Indies with a view to the scrupulous observation of a comet or an eclipse; when I trembled for fear lest some cloud (a fit of ill-humour on the artist’s part or an incident in the audience) should prevent the spectacle from taking place with the maximum of intensity; when I should not have believed that I was watching it in the best conditions had I not gone to the very theatre which was consecrated to her like an altar, in which I then felt to be an inseparable if accessory part of her appearance from behind the little red curtain, the officials with their white carnations appointed by her, the vaulted balcony over a pit filled with a shabbily dressed crowd, the women selling programmes bearing her photograph, the chestnut-trees in the square outside, all those companions, those confidants of my impressions of those days which seemed to me to be inseparable from them. Phèdre, the “Declaration Scene,” Berma, had had then for me a sort of absolute existence.