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By Root 1706 0

did not seem to please her. And yet, after a few days during which the memory of the two girls fought against heavy odds for the mastery of my amorous feelings with that of Mme de Guermantes, it was in the end the latter which, as though of its own accord, generally prevailed while its competitors withdrew; it was to it that I finally found myself, on the whole voluntarily still and as though from choice and with pleasure, to have transferred all my thoughts of love. I had ceased to dream of the little girls coming from their catechism, or of a certain dairy-maid; and yet I had also lost all hope of encountering in the street what I had come to seek, either the affection promised to me at the theatre in a smile, or the profile, the bright face beneath its pile of golden hair which were so only when seen from afar. Now I should not even have been able to say what Mme de Guermantes was like, what I recognised her by, for every day, in the picture which she presented as a whole, the face was as different as were the dress and the hat.

Why, on such and such a morning, when I saw advancing towards me beneath a violet hood a sweet, smooth face whose charms were symmetrically arranged about a pair of blue eyes and into which the curve of the nose seemed to have been absorbed, did I gauge from a joyous commotion in my breast that I was not going to return home without having caught a glimpse of Mme de Guermantes? Why did I feel the same perturbation, affect the same indifference, turn away my eyes with the same abstracted air as on the day before, at the appearance in profile in a side street, beneath a navy-blue toque, of a beak-like nose alongside a red cheek with a piercing eye, like some Egyptian deity? Once it was not merely a woman with a bird’s beak that I saw but almost the bird itself; Mme de Guermantes’s outer garments, even her toque, were of fur, and since she thus left no cloth visible, she seemed naturally furred, like certain vultures whose thick, smooth, tawny, soft plumage looks like a sort of animal’s coat. In the midst of this natural plumage, the tiny head arched out its beak and the bulging eyes were piercing and blue.

One day I would be pacing up and down the street for hours on end without seeing Mme de Guermantes when suddenly, inside a dairy shop tucked in between two of the mansions of this aristocratic and plebeian quarter, there would emerge the vague and unfamiliar face of a fashionably dressed woman who was asking to see some petits suisses, and before I had had time to distinguish her I would be struck, as by a flash of light reaching me sooner than the rest of the image, by the glance of the Duchess; another time, having failed to meet her and hearing midday strike, realising that it was not worth my while to wait for her any longer, I would be mournfully making my way homewards absorbed in my disappointment and gazing absent-mindedly at a receding carriage, when suddenly I realised that the nod which a lady had given through the carriage window was meant for me, and that this lady, whose features, relaxed and pale, or alternatively tense and vivid, composed, beneath a round hat or a towering plume, the face of a stranger whom I had supposed that I did not know, was Mme de Guermantes, by whom I had let myself be greeted without so much as an acknowledgement. And sometimes I would come upon her as I entered the carriage gate, standing outside the lodge where the detestable porter whose inquisitive eyes I loathed was in the act of making her a profound obeisance and also, no doubt, his daily report. For the entire staff of the Guermantes household, hidden behind the window curtains, would tremble with fear as they watched a conversation which they were unable to overhear, but which meant as they very well knew that one or other of them would certainly have his day off stopped by the Duchess to whom this Cerberus had betrayed him.

In view of the succession of different faces which Mme de Guermantes displayed thus one after another, faces that occupied a relative and varying expanse, sometimes narrow,