robot wrote:henryjames wrote:a young whore I plucked off the Rue St-Denis back in the days
in the 1970's?
Late eighties I think, a supreme decade for 'boomers'.
Of course I understand about French tarts and cakes, FFSThe famous passage in Proust is when the narrator's friend finally introduces him to his mistress, having sung her praises extensively and confessed how much he is spending on her.
As soon as the narrator sees the girl, he is struck by the fact that she is of nondescript appearance, having
'un petit morceau de visage' 'a little scrap of a face'. Then he realises that he has seen her before - a couple of years back, in a brothel, where she was asking twenty francs (now approx €30??) and he didn't fancy fucking her.
Part of this immortal passage:
Je me rendais compte de tout ce qu'une imagination humaine peut mettre derrière un petit morceau de visage comme était celui de cette femme, si c'est l'imagination qui l'a connue d'abord ; et, inversement, en quels misérables éléments matériels et dénués de toute valeur pouvait se décomposer ce qui était le but de tant de rêveries, si, au contraire, cela avait été perçu d'une manière opposée, par la connaissance la plus triviale. Je comprenais que ce qui m'avait paru ne pas valoir vingt francs quand cela m'avait été offert pour vingt francs dans la maison de passe où c'était seulement pour moi une femme désireuse de gagner vingt francs, peut valoir plus qu'un million, que la famille, que toutes les situations enviées, si on a commencé par imaginer en elle un être inconnu, curieux à connaître, difficile à saisir, à garder. Sans doute c'était le même mince et étroit visage que nous voyions Robert et moi. Mais nous étions arrivés à lui par les deux routes opposées qui ne communiqueraient jamais, et nous n'en verrions jamais la même face. Henry's translation (just to prove that he does understand French as well as having a huge cock...)
I realized how much a human imagination can put behind a little scrap of a face like that woman's, if it was imagination that knew her first; and on the other hand, how the goal of so many dreams could be decomposed into such miserable material elements, of no value at all, if it had been perceived in an opposite way, by the most trivial knowledge. I understood that what had seemed to me not to be worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in the whorehouse, where it was only for me a woman eager to earn twenty francs, can be worth more than a million, than family, than all enviable social positions, if one has begun by imagining in her an unknown being, hard to get to know, difficult to grasp, to keep. Without doubt it was the same thin and narrow face that Robert and I saw. But we had come to it by two opposite roads which would never connect, and we would never see the same side of it.
by henryjames on Sat Aug 02, 2025 4:14 am 
