Status Updates From In the Shadow of Young Girl...

“It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her mother's, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her.”

“It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the qualities and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents, only one will be found in the child, and allied to the very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it.”

“Highly strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, 'beneath' them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal."

“Perhaps the more the great writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own persona life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives.”

Et c'est reparti 🙇‍♂️