The words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann.
They enabled him (gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the
image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she
had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler
form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually
reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the
whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings
were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his
estimate of her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles; while
the kiss, the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but
moderately attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat
withered flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his
adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as
exquisite as they would be supernatural.
And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done
nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was not
unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an inestimably
precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially
charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would contemplate at one
moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at
another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a
collector.
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