Subject: (urth) Proust etc.

From: Alice Turner <akt at ibm.net>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 20:31:39 +0000

My dear corncrake!

Chapeaux off to you indeed! One small correction: frangipane means powdered
or ground almonds, often mixed with fine sugar. Akin to marzipane, but dry.

Etamine can be a fine sieve in cooking, but also refers to gauzy feminine
garments, either chemises or gowns (think Josephine in those transparent
Empire frocks). My guess is that it here refers to the finely woven
altar-cloth (I have Proust in English right up there on the shelf, but I'm
not going to look unless you tell me exactly where this is).

Wayman's Garden Encyclopedia comes to the rescue:

Nymphaea (nim-FEE-a) A genus of hardy and tropical water-lilies belonging to
the Water-lily Family, with rounded leaves floating on the surface of the
water (sometimes colored underneath) and with flowers floating on the
surface or standing a few inches above the water; flowers white, yellow,
pink, red or blue, with many variations in the gorgeously flowered hybrids.
Some bloom during the day, some at night. The fruits are usually borne under
the water.

(This is quite lyrical for old Wayman.)

-alga

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 08:32:24 +0000

"Alice Turner" wrote:
> One small correction: frangipane means powdered

OK, I didn't look that up.  I may have got confused with the older english
for marzipan, marchpane, which is no more like the french than the modern
word, but different enough to confuse me, which tends to be quite easy.

> not going to look unless you tell me exactly where this is).

Aha, this sounds more in the right direction; Cassells didn't have this
either.  For orientation, we are in the `Combray' part of Swann's Way (this
edition goes straight into Combray, there's no separate `Ouverture',
i.e. the first sentences of Combray is `Longtemps, je me suis couch'e de
bonne heure'), which lasts from about page 90 (after a long introduction)
to about page 300, where Swann in Love starts --- the Guermantes Way
business is right before that, and the stuff I quoted lies between pages
217 and 281 (as I gave them).  The English may well have a resum'e too, I
think mine did.

> the Water-lily Family

Maybe I should have paid more attention to what these were doing in the
Vivonne, then, but I switched off in exhaustion after `nenuphar'.

corncrake