ATDTDA (2): Headwear in ATD? (pp. 1 - 44)

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

A really fine example of Proust's way with headgear, this being
our first glimpse of the Princese de Guermantes on pages 34/35 
in Mark Treharne's translation of the the Guermantes Way:

Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of her 
lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat 
to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock, 
beside a wide, vitreous reflection that was probably a mirror, and 
which suggested a section, perpendicular, dark and liquid, cut by 
a ray of sunlight in the dazzled crystal of the sea. At once a feather 
and a corolla, like certain marine plants, a great white flower, as 
downey as a bird's wing, hung down from the Princesse's forehead 
along one of her cheeks, following its curve with flirtatious suppleness, 
lovingly attentive, as if half enclosing it, like a pink egg in the down of 
a halcyon's nest. Over her hair, reaching down to her eyebrows and 
continuing lower down at her throat, hung a net made up of little white 
shells that are fished  from certain Southern seas, mingled with pearls, 
a marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and every so often 
plunged back into darkness, in which, even then, a human prescence 
was revealed by the glittering motility of the Princesse's eyes. . . .