On alighting from his carriage, in the
foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which
hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions,
and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and setting,
Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of Balzac's
'tigers'--now 'grooms'--. who normally followed their mistress when she
walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out of doors, in
front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the stables, as
gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of their several
flower-beds. The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for
analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted
itself here, but in a more positive and more general form; it was society
as a whole, now that he was detached from it, which presented itself to
him in a series of pictures. In the cloak-room, into which, in the old
days, when he was still a man of fashion, he would have gone in his
overcoat, to emerge from it in evening dress, but without any impression
of what had occurred there, his mind having been, during the minute or two
that he had spent in it, either still at the party which he had just left,
or already at the party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now
noticed, for the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so
belated a guest, the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the
enormous footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests,
until, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their
feet and gathered in a circle round about him.
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