ABSTRACT
once in Florence I came to know a man who was reputed, by himself and also by certain practitioners of minor literary history, to have been a beautiful boy whose long slender fingers and lively eyes were much admired by Marcel Proust. When I met him, his most startling characteristic was his great accumulation of years, but he was healthy, that mummified health of extreme tenacity, and he was still quick as a boy across the dust and debris of Tuscany in the summer of 1950. He also claimed to have enjoyed the particular friendship of a great English poet, dead in World War I, and to have inspired some of the poet’s most memorable (now forgotten) lines.
