# various New Sun/Proust quotes (+ Napoleon) *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 18 Aug 2003* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### maa32 *18 Aug 2003, 22:38* I was just finishing up Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and was caught off guard by how many of my favorite Wolfe quotes come from book six (The Fugitive, in my translation). "Love is the only divinity", "All things that we consider imperishable tend to their own destruction", "Certain philosophers aver that the real world is a construction of the mind", "Time turns our lies into truth", eating a Chatelaine to invoke involuntary memory instead of a Madeleine cookie, etc. I remember one debate that was innocuous enough last year in which we discussed Weer's answer to the riddle of Napoleon's hand in his coat from Peace. Proust offers a joking answer: Napoleon took liqourice tablets for his liver which stained his books, and the liver bothered him so much that he grabbed it all the time and eventually died of the ailment. If you look it up on the internet, most sites say that it was "fashionable" for a gentleman to hold his hand that way in portraits during Napoleon's time. My own crude theory back then was that Napoleon's documented erectile dysfunction occupied him at all times, especially on the battle field, where some residual excitement may have offerred some solace to his condition. (A psychological Priapism in battle, perhaps?) In any case, does anyone think that Proust's explanation for the hand has anything to do with Alden Dennis Weer's explanation? It may be found in the beginning segments of Time Regained. Just a few worthless bits ... Marc Aramini ---