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By Root 1306 0

he left her at seven o’clock to go and dress for the evening, all the way home in his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure had filled him, he kept repeating to himself: “How nice it would be to have a little woman like that in whose house one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.” An hour or so later he received a note from Odette, and at once recognised that large handwriting in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon ill-formed characters, suggestive, perhaps, to less biased eyes than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and will-power. Swann had left his cigarette-case at her house. “If only,” she wrote, “you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have that back.”

More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her a little later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of concentrating on the fresh and rosy cheekbones to the exclusion of the rest of her cheeks which were so often drawn and sallow, and sometimes mottled with little red spots, distressed him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre. He was bringing her an engraving which she had asked to see. She was not very well, and received him in a dressing-gown of mauve crêpe de Chine, drawing its richly embroidered material over her bosom like a cloak. Standing there beside him, her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose in order to be able to lean without effort over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the old masters not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew: as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr du Boulbon. Perhaps, having always regretted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he imagined a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists in the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had introduced into their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and truth to life, a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the need to find in an old masterpiece some such anticipatory and rejuvenating allusion to personalities of today. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual characteristics take on a more general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the resemblance between an historic portrait and a modern original whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be—and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he had been receiving for some time past, even though they had come to him rather through the channel of his appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for painting as well—it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure