In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [81]
But since a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, completed his thought in these words, words which were to assume later on in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning which I had not had the sense to heed: “The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a while he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells are kept lighted day and night to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.”
I reverted to M. de Norpois. “You must never trust him; he has the most wicked tongue,” said Mme Swann in a tone which seemed to me to indicate that M. de Norpois had spoken ill of her, especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke, as though to stop her before she went too far.
Meanwhile Gilberte, who had twice been told to go and get ready to go out, remained listening to our conversation, sitting between her mother and her father, her head resting affectionately against the latter’s shoulder. Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme Swann, who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after a while one saw in Gilberte many of the features—for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unerring decision by the invisible sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations—the expression, the movements of her mother; to take an illustration from another art, she recalled a portrait that was as yet a poor likeness of Mme Swann, whom the painter, from some colourist’s whim, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian “character.” And since not only was she wearing a fair wig, but every atom of darkness had been evicted from her flesh which, stripped of its brown veils, seemed more naked, covered simply in rays shed by an internal sun, this “make-up” was not just superficial but incarnate: Gilberte had the air of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological fancy dress. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme Swann piecemeal, without any material at its disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte’s face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette’s nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact M. Swann’s two moles. It was a new variety of Mme Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside a purple. At the same time it would be wrong to imagine the line of demarcation between these two likenesses as absolutely clear-cut. Now and then, when Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father’s cheek upon her mother’s face, as though they had been put together to see what would result from the blend; this oval took shape as an embryo forms; it lengthened obliquely, swelled, and a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte’s eyes there was the frank and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when she gave me the agate marble and said “Keep it as a souvenir of