Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something which is at once similar to and different from the preceding rhyme, which was prompted by it, but introduces the variety of a new idea, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellectual, the  other prosodic? But Berma at the same time made her words, her lines, her whole speeches even, flow into lakes of sound vaster than themselves, at the margins of which it was a joy to see them obliged to stop, to break off; thus it is that a poet takes pleasure in making hesitate for a moment at the rhyming point the word which is about to spring forth, and a composer in merging the various words of his libretto in a single rhythm which contradicts,  captures and controls them. Thus into the prose sentences of the modern  playwright as into the poetry of Racine Berma managed to introduce those vast images of grief, nobility; passion, which were the masterpieces of her own personal art, and in which she could be recognised as, in the portraits which he has made of different sitters, we recognise a painter.

 

  I had no longer any desire, as on the former occasion, to be able to arrest and perpetuate Berma's attitudes, the fine colour effect which she gave for a moment only in a beam of limelight which at once faded never to re- appear, nor to make her repeat a single line  a hundred times over. I realised

that my original desire had been more exacting than the intentions of the poet, the actress, the great decorative artist who supervised her productions, and that that charm which floated over a line as it was spoken, those unstable poses perpetually transformed into others, those successive pic-tures were the transient result, the momentary object, the changing mas-terpiece which the art of the theatre undertook to create and which would perish were an attempt made to fix it for all time by a too much enraptured listener.  I did not even make a resolution to come back another day and hear Berma again.  I was satisfied with her; it was when I admired too keenly not to be disappointed by the object of my admiration, whether that object were Gilberte or Berma, that I demanded in advance, of the impression to be received on the morrow, the pleasure that yesterday's impression had refused to  afford me. Without seeking to analyse the joy wvhich I had begun now to feel, and might perhaps have been turning to some more profitable use, I said to myself, as in the old days I might  have said to one of my school fellows: "Certainly, I put Berma first!" not with-out a confused feeling that Berma's  genius was not, perhaps, very accurately represented by this affirmation of my preference, or this award to

 

 

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her of a 'first' place, whatever the peace of mind that it might incidentally restore to me.

 

  Just as the curtain was rising on this second play I looked up at Mme.de Guermantes's box. The Princess was in the act-by a movement that called into being an exquisite line which my mind pursued into the void--of turning her head towards the back of the box; her party were all standing, and also turning towards the back, and between the double hedge which they thus formed, with all the assurance, the grandeur of the goddess that’s he was, but with a strange meekness which so late an arrival, making everyone else get up in the  middle of the performance, blended with the white muslin in which she was attired, just as an adroitly compounded air of simplicity, shyness and confusion tempered her triumphant smile, the Duchesse de Guermantes, who had at that moment   entered the box, came towards her cousin, made a profound obeisance to  a young man with fair hair who was seated in the front row, and turning again towards the mphibian monsters who were floating in the recesses of the cavern, gave to these demigods of the Jockey Club-who at that moment,  and among them all M. de Palancy in particular, were the  men whom I should most  have liked to be--the familiar 'good evening' of an old and intimate friend, an allusion to the daily sequence of her relations with them during the last fifteen years. I felt the mystery, but could  not solve the riddle of that smil-ing gaze which she addressed to her friends, in the azure brilliance with which it glowed while she surrendered her hand to one and then to another, a gaze which, could I have broken up its prism, analysed its crystallisation, might perhaps have revealed to me the essential quality of the unknown form of life which became apparent in it at that moment. The Duc de Guermantes followed his wife, the flash of his monocle, the gleam of his teeth, the whiteness of his carnation or of his pleated shirt-front scattering, to make room for their light, the darkness of his eyebrows, lips and coat.; with a wave of his outstretched hand which he let drop on to their shoulders, vertically, without moving his head, he commanded the inferior monsters, who were making way for him, to resume their seats, and made a profound bow to the fair young man. One would have said that the Duchess had guessed that her cousin, of whom, it was rumoured, she was inclined to make fun for what she called her 'exaggerations' (a name which, from her own point of view, so typically French and   restrained, would naturally be applied to the poetry and enthusiasm of the Teuton), would be wearing this evening one of those costumes in which the Duchess thought of her as 'dressed up,' and that she had decided to give her a lesson in good taste. Instead of the wonderful downy plumage which, from the crown of the Princess's head, fell and swept her throat, instead of her net of shells and pearls, the Duchess wore in her hair only a simple aigrette,  which, rising above her arched nose and level eyes, reminded one of the crest on the head of a bird. Her neck and shoulders emerged from a drift of snow-white muslin, against which fluttered a swans down fan, but below  this her gown, the bodice of which had for its sole ornament innumerable spangles (either little sticks and beads of metal, or possibly brilliants), moulded her figure with a precision that was positively British. But different as

 

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their two costumes were, after the Princess had given her cousin the chai rin which she herself had previously been sitting, they could be seen turning to gaze at one another in mutual appreciation.

 

  Possibly a smile would curve the lips of Mme. de Guermantes when next day she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that it had been, all the same, quite lovely, and marvellously arranged; and the Princess, whose own

tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a little 'tailor-made' in her cousin's way of dressing, would discover in this rigid sobriety an exquisite  refinement. Moreover the harmony that existed between them, the universal and pre-established gravitation exercised by their upbringing, neutralised the contrasts not only in their apparel but in their attitude. Bet hose invisible magnetic longitudes which the refinement of their manners traced between them the expansive nature of the Princess was stopped short, while on the other side the formal correctness of the Duchess allowed itself to be attracted and relaxed, turned to sweetness and charm. As, in the play which was now being performed, to realise how much personal poetry Berma extracted from it one had only to entrust the part which she was playing, which she alone could play, to no matter what other actress, so the spectator who should raise his eyes to the balcony might see in two smaller boxes there how an 'arrangement' supposed to suggest  that of the Princesse de Guermantes simply made the Baronne de Morien-val appear eccentric, pretentious and ill-bred, while an effort, as pains-taking as it must have been costly, to imitate the clothes and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme. de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, rigid, erect, dry, angular, with a lume of raven's feathers stuck vertically in her hair. Perhaps the proper place for this lady was not a theatre in which it was only with the brightest stars of the season that the boxes (even those in the highest tier, which from below seemed like great hampers brimming with human flowers and fastened to the gallery on which they stood by the red cords of their  plush-covered partitions) composed a panorama which  deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which this evening was held motionless by attention, heat, giddiness, dust, smartness or boredom, in that so to speak everlasting moment of unconscious waiting and calm torpor which, in retrospect, seems always to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker of a fire.

 

  The explanation of Mme. de Cambremer's presence on this occasion was that the Princesse de Parme, devoid of snobbishness as are most truly royal personages, and to make up for this devoured by a pride in and passion  for charity which held an equal place in her heart with her taste for what she believed to be the Arts, had bestowed a few boxes here and there upon women like Mme. de Cambremer who were not numbered among the high-est aristocratic society but with whom she was connected in various char-itable undertakings. Mme. de Cambremer never took her eyes off the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which was all the simpler for her since, not being actually acquainted with either, she could not be suspected, of angling for recognition. Inclusion in the visiting lists of these two great

 

 

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ladies was nevertheless the goal towards which she had been marching for the last ten years with untiring patience. She had calculated that she might reach it, possibly, in five years more. But having been smitten by a relentless  malady, the inexorable character of which-for she prided herself upon her medical knowledge-she thought she knew, she was afraid that she might not live so long. This evening she was happy at least in the thought that all these women whom she barely knew  would see in her company a man who was one of their own set, the young Marquis deBeausergent, Mme. d'Argencourt's brother, who moved impartially in both  worlds and with whom the women of the second were greatly delighted to bedizen themselves before the eyes of those of the first. He was seated behind Mme. de Cambremer on a chair placed at an angle, so that he might rake the other boxes with his glasses.