Page 645 - swanns-way

den from me), and furthermore, for I very soon learned, as
we shall see in due course, that they did not like my playing
with her, that feeling of veneration which we always have for
those who hold, and exercise without restraint, the power to
do us an injury.
I assigned the first place, in the order of aesthetic mer-
it and of social grandeur, to simplicity, when I saw Mme.
Swann on foot, in a ‘polonaise’ of plain cloth, a little toque
on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of
violets in her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias
as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her own
house, and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy
of the gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure
at a distance, were raising their hats to her and saying to
one another that there was never anyone so well turned out
as she. But instead of simplicity it was to ostentation that I
must assign the first place if, after I had compelled Françoise,
who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs
were ‘giving’ beneath her, to stroll up and down with me
for another hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte
Dauphine, figuring for me a royal dignity, the passage of
a sovereign, an impression such as no real Queen has ever
since been able to give me, because my notion of their power
has been less vague, and more founded upon experience—
borne along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender
and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin
Guys, carrying on its box an enormous coachman, furred
like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom, like
Toby, ‘the late Beaudenord’s tiger,’ I saw—or rather I felt

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