Page 181 - swanns-way
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my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the expression on
         her face what she thought of it, and how she would reply.
         And in this way—whereas an artist who had been reading
         memoirs of the seventeenth century, and wished to bring
         himself nearer to the great Louis, would consider that he
         was making progress in that direction when he constructed
         a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic
         family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of
         the reigning Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his
         eyes to the mistake he was making in seeking to establish a
         similarity by an exact and therefore lifeless copy of mere out-
         ward forms—a middle-aged lady in a small country town,
         by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to
         her own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief
         engendered by the utter idleness of her existence, could see,
         without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most
         trivial occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her
         luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their des-
         potic singularity, something of the interest that was to be
         found in what Saint-Simon used to call the ‘machinery’ of
         life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that
         her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her
         features, would provide Françoise with matter for a mental
         commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the si-
         lence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King when
         a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a peti-
         tion to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.
            One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous
         visits from the Curé and from Eulalie, and had been left

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