Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

From time to time, under the gaze of the old paintings assembled by Swann in a ‘collector’s’ arrangement which added a finishing touch to the antiquated, old-fashioned nature of this scene, with this very ‘Restoration’ Duc and this perfectly ‘Second Empire’ courtesan in one of the wraps he liked so much, the lady in pink would interrupt him with her bright chatter; he would stop dead and glare at her, fiercely. Perhaps he had come to realize that she too, like the Duchesse, sometimes said silly things; perhaps, in an old man’s hallucination, he thought that it was a badly timed witticism from Mme de Guermantes that had interrupted him, believing himself to be in the Guermantes hôtel, as chained animals might imagine for a moment that they are free in the deserts of Africa again. And brusquely lifting his head, with his little round yellow eyes, which had a wild animal gleam to them, he would fix her with one of the looks which had sometimes, when I was visiting Mme de Guermantes, and he thought she was talking too much, made me tremble. Thus the Duc stared for moment at the audacious lady in pink. But she stared back, her gaze not leaving his eyes, and at the end of a few moments which seemed very long to those watching, the vanquished old beast, remembering that he was not free at home with the Duchesse, in that Sahara whose entrance is marked by the door-mat at the top of the stairs, but in his cage in the Zoological Gardens at Mme de Forcheville’s, sank his head, from w...