MARCEL PROUSTstep, and long skirts sweeping the grave1.l He tried to analyse her
fascination, in which one may recognise the Freudian identifica-
tion of the courtesan with the mother, in purely aesthetic terms:
the rounded lines of her neck and shoulders were those of an
Etruscan vase, the corner of her mouth was that of a Luini or
Botticelli Virgin; the pink of her dress was more exquisite than
the September sky above the Bois at six in the evening, and the
blue of her hat-band reminded him of deep, still water. He wrote
to her to inform her of his admiration, and she wrote back; then
he sent a photograph, and she gave him several of herself, which
he kept till the end of his life, in his album crammed with the
images of women and men he had loved or liked, of picnics and
house-parties, the records of his wasted time. For one moment of
his novel she became Odette, whom Swann, too, was to compare
to a Botticelli: Proust revealed to a friend that when Odette walks
by the Tir aux Pigeons, 'letting the long train of her mauve skirt
trail behind her', and the onlooking gentleman says to his friend:
"I was in bed with her on the day MacMabon resigned'? she is
Leonie Closmesnil.
He was already trying, tied to the cord whieh led so deeply and
painfully to the bottom of his heart that it would always pull him
back, to escape from me family. Perhaps he would never have
wished or dared to devote his September to the pretty girl and
the beautiful cocotte if his mother had been at home. But she had
left him for a holiday with his young brother, for whom she was
trying to find a riding-companion-perhaps young Eiffel Chis
father built the Tower, you know!') would do? So Marcel good-
humouredly sent on 'His Majesty's' new hunting-horn, which
seemed much too big, more like a trumpet to be blown on Judg-
ment Day: "It looks very funny and I can't think what it's for,"
said Vietoire. Perhaps it was in this monm mat he ventured still
further into the forbidden country of normal love, and retreated
still more disenchanted. A schoolfellow persuaded him to visit a
bromel, an incident which he recalled in his novel, when Bloch
informs me Narrator to his amazement mat 'women never ask for
anything better man to make love', and by taking him to a house
1 She wore a white lock of hair, intentionally bleached, on her forehead,
and was known as 'the Butcheress', because her first lover had been a butcher.
Odette, too, appears in the Bois 'with a single grey lock in her hair, now
turned yellow' (I, 4JY). 2 1,420,421