Page 344 - swanns-way

As she stood there beside him, brushing his cheek with the
loosened tresses of her hair, bending one knee in what was
almost a dancer’s pose, so that she could lean without tir-
ing herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with
bended head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so wea-
ry and so sullen when there was nothing to animate her,
Swann was struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zip-
porah, Jethro’s Daughter, which is to be seen in one of the
Sixtine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination
in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely
the general characteristics of the people whom he encoun-
tered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible
of generalisation, the individual features of men and wom-
en whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge
Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the
slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own
coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose
of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion
of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker,
the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids
of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regret-
ted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the
social side of life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he
felt that he might find a sort of indulgence bestowed upon
him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact that
they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into
the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give
those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and
trueness to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps,

344 Swann’s Way