THE DUCHESSE AND ALBERTINE 119includes the Finalys. 'Mile Finaly,' he told Billy at the year's end,
'looks like a painting by Rossetti, who is thus incongruously
linked with Shakespeare, the indisputable creator of Horace!'
Proust's love for Marie Finaly can hardly have been of more
than minor importance in his life, or its appearance in his letters
and other biographical sources would have been less unobtrusive;
but its influence on A la Recherche was considerable. In his life her
position in time and place correspond to that of Albertine in his
novel: his love for Marie came immediately after his successive
wooings of originals of Gilberte, Odette and the Duchesse de
Guermantes; and it happened during a summer on the Normandy
coast and a winter in Paris. It was round the distant, half-
obliterated figure of Marie Finaly that Albertine was to crystallise.
And in its lasting effect this love was one Of the turning-points of
his life. After the fiasco of Mme de Chevigne he never again fell
in love with an older woman; after Marie Finaly it was many
years before he next fell in love with a girl. With relief and joy,
in the spring of 1893, he took the only path that now lay open,
the path he had been deviously and unconsciously seeking all the
way from Marie de Benardaky to Marie Finaly. It led into the
deep valley of the Cities of the Plain, still green and fertile, un-
touched as yet by the fire from heaven.