porter who also does cobbling, keeps hens, grows flowers, and, at the far end, in the main building, a “Comtesse” who, when she drives out in her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which seem to have escaped from the plot by the porter’s lodge (with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who gets down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighbourhood), scatters vague little smiles and waves her hand in greeting to the porter’s children and to such of her respectable fellow-tenants as may happen to be passing, who, to her contemptuous affability and levelling pride, seem all the same. In the house in which we had now come to live, the great lady at the end of the courtyard was a Duchess, smart and still quite young. She was, in fact, Mme. de Guermantes and, thanks to Françoise, I soon came to know all about her household. For the Guermantes (to whom Françoise regularly alluded as the people “below”, or “downstairs”) were her constant preoccupation from the first thing in the morning when, as she did Mamma’s hair, casting a forbidden, irresistible, furtive glance down into the courtyard, she would say: “Look at that, now; a pair of holy Sisters; that’ll be for downstairs, surely;” or, “Oh! just look at the fine pheasants in the kitchen window; no need to ask where they came from, the Duke will have been out with his gun!”—until the last thing at night when, if her ear, while she was putting out my night-things, caught a few notes of a song, she would conclude: “They’re having company down below; gay doings, I’ll be bound;” whereupon, in her symmetrical face, beneath the arch of her now snow-white hair, a smile from her young days, sprightly but proper, would for a moment set each of her features in its place, arranging them in an intricate and special order, as though for a country-dance.