Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [205]
Mme de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that her own consciousness of her Guermantes connexion could not be made externally manifest in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a vertical column by the side of some holy personage the words which he is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation, or even a call, from her young cousin the Princesse des Laumes during the six years that had elapsed since the latter’s marriage. The thought filled her with anger, but also with pride; for, by dint of telling everyone who expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme des Laumes’s that it was because of the risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there—a degradation which her own ultra-Legitimist family would never have forgiven her—she had come to believe that this actually was the reason for her not visiting her young cousin. She remembered, it is true, that she had several times inquired of Mme des Laumes how they might contrive to meet, but she remembered it only confusedly and, besides, more than neutralised this slightly humiliating reminiscence by murmuring, “After all, it isn’t for me to take the first step; I’m twenty years older than she is.” And fortified by these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back until they seemed to part company with her bust, while her head, which lay almost horizontally upon them, was reminiscent of the “detachable” head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers. Not that she in the least resembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a squat, dumpy and masculine figure; but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she was obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite the equal of the rest of the Guermantes clan, to repeat to herself incessantly that it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride that she saw so little of them, the constant iteration had ended up by remoulding her body and giving her a sort of presence which was accepted by bourgeois ladies as a sign of breeding, and even kindled at times a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old clubmen. Had anyone subjected Mme de Gallardon’s conversation to that form of analysis which by noting the relative frequency of its several terms enables one to discover the key to a coded text, they would at once have remarked that no expression, not even the commonest, occurred in it nearly so often as “at my cousins the Guermantes’,” “at my aunt Guermantes’s,” “Elzéar de Guermantes’s health,” “my cousin Guermantes’s box.” If anyone spoke to her of a distinguished personage, she would reply that, although she was not personally acquainted with him, she had seen him hundreds of times at her aunt Guermantes’s, but she would utter this reply in so icy a tone, in such a hollow voice, that it was clear that if she did not know the celebrity personally it was by virtue of all the stubborn and ineradicable principles against which her shoulders leaned, as against one of those ladders on which gymnastic instructors make us stretch in order to develop the expansion of our chests.
As it happened, the Princesse des Laumes, whom no one would have expected to appear at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, had just arrived there. To show that she did not wish to flaunt her superior rank in a salon to which she had come only out of condescension, she had sidled in with her arms pressed close to her sides, even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through and no one attempting to get past her, staying purposely at the back, with the air of being in her proper place, like a king who stands in the queue at the doors of a theatre where the management have not been warned of his coming; and, restricting her gaze—so as not to seem to be advertising her presence and claiming