““At such moments Gilberte’s plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci’s pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped — with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers — to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people.””
![“For her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see their qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfort from virtue and moral edification from wealth.” quote by Marcel Proust](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/573/marcel-proust-114_character_for-her-fran-oise-wealth-was-like-a-nece_2687.jpg)
