In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [70]
On either side of us, on the topmost steps, were scattered couples who were waiting for their carriages. Erect, isolated, flanked by her husband and myself, the Duchess kept to the left of the staircase, already wrapped in her Tiepolo cloak, her throat clasped in its band of rubies, devoured by the eyes of women and men alike, who sought to divine the secret of her beauty and elegance. Waiting for her carriage on the same step of the staircase as Mme de Guermantes, but at the opposite side of it, Mme de Gallardon, who had long abandoned all hope of ever receiving a visit from her cousin, turned her back so as not to appear to have seen her, and, what was more important, so as not to offer proof of the fact that the other did not greet her. Mme de Gallardon was in an extremely bad temper because some gentlemen in her company had taken it upon themselves to speak to her of Oriane: “I haven’t the slightest desire to see her,” she had replied to them, “I did notice her, as a matter of fact, just now, and she’s beginning to show her age. It seems she can’t get over it, Basin says so himself. And I can well understand it, because, since she hasn’t any brains, is as nasty as can be, and has bad manners, she must know very well that, once her looks go, she’ll have nothing left to fall back on.”
I had put on my overcoat, for which M. de Guermantes, who dreaded chills, reproached me as we went down together, because of the heated atmosphere indoors. And the generation of noblemen who more or less passed through the hands of Mgr Dupanloup speak such bad French (except the Castellane brothers) that the Duke expressed what was in his mind thus: “It is better not to put on your coat before going out of doors, at least as a general thesis.” I can see all that departing crowd now; I can see, if I am not mistaken in placing him upon that staircase, a portrait detached from its frame, the Prince de Sagan, whose last appearance in society this must have been, paying his respects to the Duchess with so ample a sweep of his top hat in his white-gloved hand, harmonising with the gardenia in his buttonhole, that one was surprised that it was not a plumed felt hat of the ancien régime, several ancestral faces from which were exactly reproduced in the face of this noble lord. He stopped for only a short time in front of her, but his attitudes in that brief moment were sufficient to compose a complete tableau vivant and, as it were, a historical scene. Moreover, as he has since died, and as I never had more than a glimpse of him in his lifetime, he has become for me so much a character in history, social history at least, that I am sometimes astonished when I think that a woman and a man whom I know are his sister and nephew.
While we were going down the staircase, a woman who appeared to be about forty but was in fact older was climbing it with an air of lassitude that became her. This was the Princesse d’Orvillers, a natural daughter, it was said, of the Duke of Parma, whose pleasant voice rang with a vaguely Austrian accent. She advanced, tall and stooping, in a gown of white flowered silk, her exquisite bosom heaving with exhaustion beneath a harness of diamonds and sapphires. Tossing her head like a royal palfrey embarrassed by its halter of pearls, of an incalculable value but an inconvenient weight, she let fall here and there a soft and charming gaze, of an azure which, as it gradually began to fade, became more caressing still, and greeted most of the departing guests with a friendly nod. “A fine time to arrive, Paulette!” said the Duchess. “Yes, I am so sorry! But really it was a physical impossibility,” replied the Princesse d’Orvillers, who had acquired this sort of expression from the Duchesse de Guermantes, but added to it her own natural sweetness and