In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [257]
“We were speaking just now of Carquethuit,” he said to me as we walked towards his villa. “I’ve done a little sketch in which you can see the curve of the beach much better. The painting is not too bad, but it’s different. If you will allow me, as a souvenir of our friendship, I’d like to give you the sketch,” he went on, for the people who refuse us the objects of our desire are always ready to offer us something else.
“I should very much like, if you have such a thing, a photograph of the little portrait of Miss Sacripant. By the way, that’s not a real name, surely?”
“It’s the name of a character the sitter played in a stupid little musical comedy.”
“But, I assure you, Monsieur, that I’ve never set eyes on her; you look as though you thought that I knew her.”
Elstir was silent. “It couldn’t be Mme Swann before she was married?” I hazarded, in one of those sudden fortuitous stumblings upon the truth, which are rare enough in all conscience, and yet suffice, after the event, to give a certain cumulative support to the theory of presentiments, provided that one takes care to forget all the wrong guesses that would invalidate it.
Elstir did not reply. The portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crécy. She had preferred not to keep it for many reasons, some of them only too obvious. But there were others less apparent. The portrait dated from before the point at which Odette, disciplining her features, had made of her face and figure that creation the broad outlines of which her hairdressers, her dressmakers, she herself—in her way of holding herself, of speaking, of smiling, of moving her hands and eyes, of thinking—were to respect throughout the years to come. It required the vitiated taste of a surfeited lover to make Swann prefer to all the countless photographs of the “definitive” Odette who was his charming wife the little photograph which he kept in his room and in which, beneath a straw hat trimmed with pansies, one saw a thin young woman, fairly plain, with bunched-out hair and drawn features.
But in any case, even if the portrait had been, not anterior, like Swann’s favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette’s features into a new type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to discompose that type. Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type. All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the maintenance of which she oversees in her mirror every day before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman’s features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head. Similarly it often happens that, after a certain age, the eye of a great scientist will find everywhere the elements necessary to establish those relations which alone are of interest to him. Like those craftsmen, those players who, instead of making a fuss and asking for what they cannot have, content themselves with whatever comes to hand, the artist might say of anything, no matter what, that it will serve his purpose. Thus a cousin of the Princesse de Luxembourg, a beauty of the most queenly type, having taken a fancy to a form of art which was new at that time, had asked the leading painter of the naturalist school to do her portrait. At once the artist’s eye found what he had been seeking everywhere. And on his canvas there appeared, in place of the proud lady,