Within a Budding Grove (vol II p 156 ff) October Notes 2010

 p 157 | Swann drew me aside for a moment while his wife talked of the weather and of the animals recently added to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, with the Princess. "That is the Princesse Mathilde," he told me; "you know who I mean, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she’s the niece of Napoleon I. She had offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia. 

 Mathilde Laetitia Wilhelmine Bonaparte, Princesse Française (May 27, 1820 - January 2, 1904), was a French princess and Salon holder. She was a daughter of Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte and his second wife, Catharina of Württemberg.

~~ Hippolyte Taine (historian & critic)

P.P.C. (pour prendre congé): For leave-taking; sometimes written on the address cards of persons about to leave a locality when they pay their farewell visits. In English, paid parting call.  [E. Cobham Brewer,1810–97. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898]

>> Cin`ga`lese´ ::  n. sing.; 1. A native or natives of Ceylon descended from its primitive inhabitants

Jardin d'Acclimatation (The Paris Zoo) in the Bois

 ...marvellous garment of crêpe-de-Chine or silk, old rose, cherry-coloured, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red or yellow, plain or patterned, in which Mme. Swann had sat down to luncheon and which she was now going to take off. 

Tiepolo Pink::

dressing gown/housecoat

... without crossing the path of that inextinguishable ray cast backwards to infinity, even into my own most distant past, by the lobster à l’Américaine which I had just been eating?

p | 156 | .."Charles ! Don't you see Mme de Montmorency?"