Proust etc.
The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 26 Jul 1999
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1725

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Alice Turner — 26 Jul 1999, 20:31

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

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Peter Stephenson — 27 Jul 1999, 08:32
  follows, by subject match Alice Turner

> "Alice Turner" wrote:
> One small correction: frangipane means powdered
> or ground almonds, often mixed with fine sugar. Akin to marzipane, but dry.

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.

> 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).

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.

> Nymphaea (nim-FEE-a) A genus of hardy and tropical water-lilies belonging to
> 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

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