In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [257]
A single point at which Guermantes and Courvoisiers converged was the art (one, moreover, of infinite variety) of keeping distances. The Guermantes manners were not absolutely uniform throughout the family. And yet, to take an example, all of them, all those who were genuine Guermantes, when you were introduced to them proceeded to perform a sort of ceremony almost as though the fact that they had held out their hands to you were as significant as if they had been dubbing you a knight. At the moment when a Guermantes, were he no more than twenty, but treading already in the footsteps of his ancestors, heard your name uttered by the person who introduced you, he let fall on you as though he had by no means made up his mind to say “How d’ye do” to you a gaze generally blue and always of the coldness of a steel blade which he seemed ready to plunge into the deepest recesses of your heart. Which was as a matter of fact what the Guermantes imagined themselves to be doing, since they all regarded themselves as psychologists of the first water. They felt moreover that they enhanced by this inspection the affability of the salute which was to follow it, and would not be rendered you without full knowledge of your deserts. All this occurred at a distance from yourself which, little enough had it been a question of a passage of arms, seemed immense for a handclasp and had as chilling an effect in the latter case as it would have had in the former, so that when a Guermantes, after a rapid tour round the last hiding-places of your soul to establish your credentials, had deemed you worthy to consort with him thereafter, his hand, directed towards you at the end of an arm stretched out to its fullest extent, appeared to be presenting a rapier to you for a single combat, and that hand was on the whole placed so far in advance of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand that he was saluting. Certain Guermantes, lacking any sense of moderation, or being incapable of refraining from repeating themselves incessantly, went further and repeated this ceremony afresh every time they met you. Seeing that they had no longer any need to conduct the preliminary psychological investigation for which the “family genie” had delegated its powers to them and the result of which they had presumably kept in mind, the insistency of the piercing gaze preceding the handclasp could be explained only by the automatism which their gaze had acquired or by some hypnotic power which they believed themselves to possess. The Courvoisiers, whose physique was different, had tried in vain to acquire that searching gaze and had had to fall back upon a haughty stiffness or a hurried negligence. On the other hand, it was from the Courvoisiers that certain very rare Guermantes of the gentler sex seemed to have borrowed the feminine form of greeting. At the moment when you were presented to one of these, she made you a sweeping bow in which she carried towards you, almost at an angle of forty-five degrees, her head and bust, the rest of her body (which was very tall) up to the belt which formed a pivot, remaining stationary. But no sooner had she projected thus towards you the upper part of her person, than she flung it backwards beyond the vertical with a brusque withdrawal of roughly equal length. This subsequent withdrawal neutralised what appeared to have been conceded to you; the ground which you believed yourself to have gained did not even remain in your possession as in a duel; the original positions were retained. This same annulment of affability