Marcel Proust: A Biography

(Ben Green) #1
SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 271

It was bad enough for a young man to get up so late in the
morning (,She represented for me those Mornings in Venice
which Ruskin never wrote and I never saw,' said Proust); but it
was shocking for him to keep a young lady out so late at night.
'Nothing could soften her, nothing could budge the inflexibility
of her principles,' and altogether, he irreverently decided, 'she
was one of the most curious of all the Stones of Venice.' Neverthe-
less, the young people contrived to escape. The sun had set, even
the north side of the Piazza was coo!. They sat drinking coffee in
the dusk outside Quadri's, and then took a gondola to the Lagoon.
Reynaldo sang Venetian folk-songs, and Gounod's setting of
Musset's
Dans Venue fa rouge
Pas un bateau 'lui bouge,


while a yellow half-moon high over San Giorgio Maggiore sent
a track of rippling light from the horizon to their trailing hands.
Influenced by a mistaken association of ideas between Florence,
flowers and pollen, Proust had decided that Florence would be
fatal for his hay fever, and the Ponte Vecchio, 'heaped with a
profusion of hyacinths and anemones', remained forever only a
vision of the Narrator. But Padua was only twenty-five miles by
train from Venice, and contained treasures of painting praised by
Ruskin even more highly than the Carpaccios which Proust had
seen at the Accademia di Belle Arti, or, Saint Mark's Rest in
hand, after a trip by gondola 'along a calm canal, a little before
one reaches the tremulous infinity of the lagoon', at San Giorgio
degli Schiavoni. Reynaldo was about to rejoin his mother and
Coco in Rome, and consented to break his journey at Padua. So
it was that Proust saw Giotto's frescoes, the Virtues and Vices of
Padua, in the chapel of the Madonna dell' Arena. He knew them
well already, not from childhood, like the Narrator to whom
Swann gave the photographs of them which hung in the school-
room at Comb ray , but only since the previous autumn, when he
had found reproductions of Charity, Injustice, Infidelity and
Envy in Ruskin's Fors Cfavigera. These are the very figures which
Proust introduced into A fa Recherche: the sturdy, mannish
Charity, with her gown billowing out at the waist, and carrying
what might almost be asparagus in her basket, became an emblem
of the pregnant kitchen-maid at Comb ray; Envy, with a serpent
issuing from her distended mouth, reminded him of illustrations
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