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By Root 1308 0

that scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, glaucous eyes, as if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of St James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race—if, indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and where it still dreams—fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue by one of the Master’s Paduan models or an Albrecht Dürer Saxon. And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature but glued to his head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which, if in its creator’s purpose it represents but man, manages at least to extract from man’s simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed, as it were, from the whole of animate nature, that a head of hair, by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the superimposition of the florid triple diadem of its tresses, can suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of hyacinths and a coil of snakes.

Others again, no less colossal, were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase for which their decorative presence and marmorean immobility might have earned, like the one in the Palace of the Doges, the name “Staircase of the Giants,” and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy by contrast would he have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck flights to the little dressmaker’s, in whose attic he would so gladly have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who on that account seemed to be possessed of some part of his mistress’s life that was more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential but longed-for staircase to the old dressmaker’s, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed milk-can set out upon the door-mat in readiness for the morning round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests, a concierge, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might tomorrow lapse to the bourgeois service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before being allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints in their niches, while a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard fashion like the beadle in a church, struck the floor with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like a Goya sacristan or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk at which lackeys seated like notaries before their massive register rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a little hall which—like certain rooms that are arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else—displayed at its entrance, like some priceless effigy by