In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [101]
of the hotel a young page took off his cap to greet me and at once put it on again. I supposed that Aimé had, to borrow his own expression, “tipped him the wink” to treat me with respect. But I saw a moment later that, as someone else entered the hotel, he doffed it again. The fact of the matter was that this young man had no other occupation in life than to take off and put on his cap, and did it to perfection. Having realised that he was incapable of doing anything else but excelled in that, he practised it as many times a day as possible, thus winning a discreet but widespread regard from the hotel guests, coupled with great regard from the hall porter upon whom devolved the duty of engaging the boys and who, until this rare bird alighted, had never succeeded in finding anyone who wasn’t sacked within a week, greatly to the astonishment of Aimé who used to say: “After all, in that job they’ve only got to be polite, which can’t be so very difficult.” The manager required in addition that they should have what he called a good “present,” meaning thereby that they should stay there, or more likely having misremembered the word “presence.” The appearance of the lawn behind the hotel had been altered by the creation of several flower-beds and by the removal not only of an exotic shrub but of the page who, at the time of my former visit, used to provide an external decoration with the supple stem of his figure and the curious colouring of his hair. He had gone off with a Polish countess who had taken him as her secretary, following the example of his two elder brothers and their typist sister, snatched from the hotel by persons of different nationality and sex who had been attracted by their charm. The only one remaining was the youngest, whom nobody wanted because he squinted. He was highly delighted when the Polish countess or the protectors of the other two brothers came on a visit to the hotel at Balbec. For, although he envied his brothers, he was fond of them and could in this way cultivate his family feelings for a few weeks in the year. Was not the Abbess of Fontevrault, deserting her nuns for the occasion, in the habit of going to partake of the hospitality which Louis XIV offered to that other Mortemart, his mistress, Madame de Montespan? The boy was still in his first year at Balbec; he did not as yet know me, but having heard his comrades of longer standing supplement the word “Monsieur” with my surname when they addressed me, he copied them from the first with an air of self-satisfaction, either at showing his familiarity with a person whom he supposed to be well-known, or at conforming with a usage of which five minutes earlier he had been unaware but which he felt it was imperative to observe. I could well appreciate the charm that this great hotel might have for certain persons. It was arranged like a theatre, and was filled to the flies with a numerous and animated cast. For all that the visitor was only a sort of spectator, he was perpetually involved in the performance, not simply as in one of those theatres where the actors play a scene in the auditorium, but as though the life of the spectator was going on amid the sumptuosities of the stage. The tennis-player might come in wearing a white flannel blazer, but the porter would have put on a blue frock-coat with silver braid in order to hand him his letters. If this tennis-player did not choose to walk upstairs, he was equally involved with the actors in having by his side, to propel the lift, its attendant no less richly attired. The corridors on each floor engulfed a flock of chambermaids and female couriers, fair visions against the sea, like the frieze of the Panathenaea, to whose modest rooms devotees of ancillary feminine beauty would penetrate by cunning detours. Downstairs, it was the masculine element that predominated and that made this hotel, in view of the extreme and idle youth of the servants, a sort of Judaeo-Christian tragedy given bodily form and perpetually in performance. And so I could not help reciting to myself, when I saw them, not