In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [313]
ART. See Literature; Music; Painting.
ASPARAGUS. Discussed by Aunt Léonie and Françoise: I 74–75. M enraptured by their iridescent colours: 168–69. The kitchen-maid allergic to their smell: 173. Elstir’s Bundle of Asparagus: III 686. The Duc de Guermantes on green asparagus; E. de Clermont-Tonnerre (q.v.) quoted on the subject: 690.
BALLET. Bakst’s decors for the Russian Ballet: II 718 (cf. V 3). Dancer admired by Rachel: III 235–36. The impact of the Russian Ballet: IV 193–94 (cf. V 314–15). Charlus’s influence on Morel as an artist compared to Diaghilev’s: 420–21. Mme Verdurin “an aged Fairy Godmother” to the Russian dancers: V 313–15. Theatrical designs of Sert, Bakst and Benois: 497–98. Reference to the “dazzling” Legend of Joseph by Sert, Strauss and Kessler: 876–77.
BEAUTY. Element of novelty essential to beauty: II 318. “The complementary part that is added to a fragmentary and fugitive stranger by our imagination, over-stimulated by regret;” “a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short”: 398–99. Youth in pursuit of Beauty: 502. “Fluid, collective and mobile beauty” of the girls of the “little band;” “noble and calm models of human beauty”: 505–6. Elstir’s ideal of beauty: 586–88. Beauty is “ordered complexity”: III 61. “True beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty”: 341. “The mysterious differences from which beauty derives”: V 157. Perverse notion that true beauty is represented by a railway carriage rather than Siena, Venice or Granada: 173–74. “The possibility of pleasure may be a beginning of beauty”: 180. The identity of the woman we love is far more important than her beauty: 593–94.
BELIEF. Our beliefs are neither engendered nor destroyed by facts: I 208–9. A fetishistic attachment to things survives the disappearance of our belief in them: 603. The part played by belief in the image we form of a person: II 595–96. Our beliefs of more importance to our happiness than the person we see, since it is through them that we can see the person: 720. Only imagination and belief can “create an atmosphere”: III 32. “Irreducible essence” which, when we are young, our beliefs confer on a woman’s clothes: 528–29. Invisible and variable atmosphere created around us by our beliefs: V 191. “Invisible belief that sustains the edifice of our sensory world”: 600. Belief engendered by desire: 690–92, 692–94, 823–25. Dubious belief which leaves room for the possibility of what we wish to be true: 792. A large part of what we believe “springs from an original mistake in our premises”: 890.
BICYCLES. Albertine pushing a bicycle: II 509; “spinning through the showers”: 645 (cf. V 658–59). The lift-boy on his bicycle: IV 344. “Winged messengers of variegated hue”—hotel messengers on bicycles: V 175. “Fabulous coursers”—girls and their bicycles in the Bois de Boulogne: 220; “half-human, half-winged, angel or peri”—another girl cyclist: 224. Albertine at the pianola revives M’s memories of her cycling at Balbec: 515, 518; speeding through Balbec bent over her “mythological wheel”: 658–59.
BIRDS. M’s bedroom in winter—building a nest like a sea-swallow: I 7. Pigeons in the Champs-Elysées—“the lilacs of the feathered kingdom”: 575, 579. Birdsong in the forests near Balbec, to which M listens like Prometheus to the Oceanides: II 408 (cf. IV 535). The “little band” at Balbec like “a flock of gulls”: 503; “an assembly of birds before taking flight”: 508 (cf. V 225). Cooing of pigeons: III 186–87 (cf. V 539–40). Blue-tits in the blossoming apple-trees near Balbec: IV 244. Gulls on the sea at Balbec—like water-lilies: 280, 284;