Page 503 - swanns-way

glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses,
can suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledg-
ling doves, a bed of hyacinths and a serpent’s writhing back.
Others again, no less colossal, were disposed upon the steps
of a monumental staircase which, by their decorative pres-
ence and marmorean immobility, was made worthy to be
named, like that god-crowned ascent in the Palace of the
Doges, the ‘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 would he, on the oth-
er hand, 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 keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his
mistress more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious
than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilen-
tial, enviable 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, in readiness for the morning round, upon the door-
mat; on the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann
was at that moment climbing, on either side of him, at dif-
ferent levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by
the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set

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