Page 345 - swanns-way

also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of
the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in an
old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion
to a person about whom jokes could be made and repeated
and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had re-
tained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find
a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features
take on a more general significance when he saw them, up-
rooted and disembodied, in the abstract idea of similarity
between an historic portrait and a modern original, whom
it was not intended to represent. However that might be,
and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which
he, for some time past, had been receiving—though, indeed,
they had come to him rather through the channel of his ap-
preciation of music—had enriched his appetite for painting
as well, it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a plea-
sure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character
and conduct, that Swann remarked Odette’s resemblance
to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom
one shrinks from giving his more popular surname, now
that ‘Botticelli’ suggests not so much the actual work of the
Master as that false and banal conception of it which has of
late obtained common currency. He no longer based his es-
timate of the merit of Odette’s face on the more or less good
quality of her cheeks, and the softness and sweetness—as
of carnation-petals—which, he supposed, would greet his
lips there, should he ever hazard an embrace, but regarded
it rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken threads, which
his gazing eyes collected and wound together, following the

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