Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way
above the street, was the ground floor of the house) Odette's bedroom,
which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel
with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between
dark painted walls, from which hung Oriental draperies, strings of Turkish
beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord from the
ceiling (which last, however, so that her visitors should not have to
complain of the want of any of the latest comforts of Western
civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two drawing-rooms,
large and small. These were entered through a narrow lobby, the wall of
which, chequered with the lozenges of a wooden trellis such as you see on
garden walls, only gilded, was lined from end to end by a long rectangular
box in which bloomed, as though in a hothouse, a row of large
chrysanthemums, at that time still uncommon, though by no means so large
as the mammoth blossoms which horticulturists have since succeeded in
making grow. Swann was irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these
flowers, which had then been 'the rage' in Paris for about a year, but it
had pleased him, on this occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby
shot with rays of pink and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these
ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of
winter afternoons.
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