But how can the people who watch these dreadful
creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of
aviary or garden-bed,--how can they imagine the charm that there was in
the sight of Mme. Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac bonnet, or
with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a single
iris?" Could I ever have made them understand the emotion that I used to
feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in an otter-skin
coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like
partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the deliberate, artificial
warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the
bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue
against the grey sky, the freezing air, the naked boughs, had the same
charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting,
and of living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this
woman, as had in the vases and beaupots of her drawing-room, beside the
blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked
out through closed windows at the falling snow? But it would not have
sufficed me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as in
those distant years.
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