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By Root 1413 0

destined to have a lasting effect upon him, that Swann remarked Odette’s resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano to whom people more willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli, now that it suggests not so much the actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which has of late obtained common currency. He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and the purely fleshy softness which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard a kiss, but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unravelled, following their curves and convolutions, relating the rhythm of the neck to the effusion of the hair and the droop of the eyelids, as though in a portrait of her in which her type was made clearly intelligible.

He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and her body, and these he tried incessantly to recapture thereafter, both when he was with Odette and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, although his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was doubtless based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made her more precious. Swann reproached himself with his failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the great Sandro would have adored, and was gratified that his pleasure in seeing Odette should have found a justification in his own aesthetic culture. He told himself that in associating the thought of Odette with his dreams of ideal happiness he had not resigned himself to a stopgap as inadequate as he had hitherto supposed, since she satisfied his most refined predilections in matters of art. He failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, since, as it happened, his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The words “Florentine painting” were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her body, the whole of her beauty, cooled the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of aesthetic principle; while the kiss, the physical possession which would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat blemished flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as they now came, to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove supernaturally delicious.

And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done nothing but see Odette, he would assure himself that he was not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially delectable metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a collector.

He placed on his study table, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro’s daughter. He would gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of the skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along the tired cheeks; and, adapting to the idea of a living woman what he had until then felt to be beautiful on aesthetic grounds, he converted it into a series of physical merits which he was gratified to find assembled in the person of one whom he might ultimately possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts one to a work of art, now that he knew the original in flesh and blood of Jethro’s daughter, became