come there solely to see her, ready to follow her elsewhere should the titular holder of the box have taken it into her head to get up and go, and regarding the rest of the house as composed merely of strangers, worth looking at simply as curiosities, though she numbered among them many friends to whose boxes she regularly repaired on other evenings and with regard to whom she never failed on those occasions to demonstrate a similar loyalty, exclusive, relativistic and weekly. Mme de Cambremer was surprised to see her there that evening. She knew that the Duchess stayed on very late at Guermantes, and had supposed her to be there still. But she had been told that sometimes, when there was some special function in Paris which she considered it worth her while to attend, Mme de Guermantes would order one of her carriages to be brought round as soon as she had taken tea with the guns, and, as the sun was setting, drive off at a spanking pace through the gathering darkness of the forest, then along the high road, to join the train at Combray and so be in Paris the same evening. “Perhaps she has come up from Guermantes especially to see Berma,” thought Mme de Cambremer, and marvelled at the thought. And she remembered having heard Swann say in that ambiguous jargon which he shared with M. de Charlus: “The Duchess is one of the noblest souls in Paris, the cream of the most refined, the choicest society.” For myself, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavaria and Condé what I imagined to be the lives and the thoughts of the two cousins (I could no longer do so from their faces, having seen them), I would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world. For in his I should have found merely intelligence, an intelligence superior to my own but similar in kind. But what the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion which would have furnished me with an invaluable clue to the nature of these two poetic creatures, I imagined with the aid of their names, I endowed with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and the longing of a fever-stricken patient, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should yield to me was the charm of the summer afternoons that I had spent wandering along the Guermantes way.
Mme de Cambremer was trying to make out how exactly the two cousins were dressed. For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialisation, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and which, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven. I gazed on this momentary apotheosis with a perturbation which was partly soothed by the feeling that I myself was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no memory of that, and I was not distressed