Swann's enormous coachman,
supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint
George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying,
steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground. Alas!
there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic,
with a tall footman towering by his side. I wished to hold before my
bodily eyes, that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as
they appeared to the eyes of memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to
seem no more than garlands about the brows of women. All the hats now were
immense; covered with fruits and flowers and all manner of birds. In place
of the lovely gowns in which Mme. Swann walked like a Queen, appeared
Greco-Saxon tunics, with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire
style, 'Liberty chiffons' sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper.
On the heads of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll with
Mme. Swann in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I found not the grey
'tile' hats of old, nor any other kind. They walked the Bois bare-headed.
And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the
faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity,
life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without
reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have
endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a
picture.
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