ed 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, 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
retained 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, uprooted 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 appreciation of music--had enriched his
appetite for painting as well, it was with an unusual intensity
of pleasure, a pleasure 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 estimate
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 curving line from the skein to the ball, where he mingled the
cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her
eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself, in which her type was
made clearly intelligible.

He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in
her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to
recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking
of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine
masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been
rep