My Year With Proust - Day 55

   "He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced  her beauty also, and rendered her more precious in his sight.  Swann reproached himself with his failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own system of aesthetic.  He told himself that, in choosing the thought of Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideals happiness, an expedient of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art.  He failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable 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 figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool 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 foundation of his aesthetic principles; while the kiss, the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as exquisite as they would be supernatural."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 237

The picture of Proust's life is slowly coming together.  A couple posts ago we gained a soundtrack to the novel, and now we have a sense of how Odette looked, or at least how she looked to Swann.  The painting Swann is comparing Odette to is Botticelli's representation of Jethro's daughter. It's funny how we will fall in love - or at least develop a substantial crush - on a woman and then turn around and seek some outside validation of our choice.  Usually it's simply a case of us going to our friends and surreptitiously (although it never fools anyone) asking them if they think, purely as a hypothetical exercise, whether or not they think some seemingly random girl is pretty.  My ex-wife did that in college and her friends, who always referred to me as "Scary Gary" avoided her to stay far away, which she did for a long time by switching from one sidewalk to another whenever she saw me coming.  Sadly, in the end her friends were right, and clearly she should have listened to them.  In this case Swann is taking it up a notch by getting his validation from a Renaissance master, who, considering how badly Odette treated Swann, turned out to be a far worse prophet than my ex-wife's friends.

If you think back to the words that Swann used to describe Odette, I can certainly see why he made the connection to this work by Botticelli.

And, to be fair, I guess I should include a painting, this classic by Goya, which is a dead ringer of me gently remonstrating one of my students.