pp. 68/69

aaaaWell really you know and in spite of the haricot skull and a tendency to use up any odds and ends of pigment that happened to be left over she was the living spit he thougth of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. Ne suis-je point pâle? Suis-je belle? But certainly pale and belle my pale belle Braut with a winter skin like any old sail in the wind. The root and the source betwixt and between the little athletic or æsthetic bit of a birdneb was indeed we assure you a constant source of delight and astonishment, when his solitude was not peopled and justified and beautified and even his sociabilities by a constipated coryza, to his forefinger pad and nail, rubbing and plumbing and palping and boring it just as for many years he polished (ecstasy of attrition!) his glasses or suffered the shakes and gracenote strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Spozen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whosoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thanks Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thanks Mr Field) and a Kleinmeister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thanks Mr Beckett), or crossed the Seine or the Pegnitz or the Tolka or the Fulda as the case might be and it never by any possible chance on one single solitary occasion occurring to him that he was on all such and similar occasions (which we regret to say lack of space obliges us regretfully to exclude from this chronicle) not merely indulging in but pandering to the vilest and basest excesses of sublimation of a certain kind. The wretched little wet plug of an upperlip, pugnozzling up and back in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils was happily to some small extent mollified and compensated by the fine full firm undershot priapism of underlip and chin, a signal recovery to say the least and a reaffirmation of the promise of sentimentic vehemence already so gothly declamatory in the wedgehead of the strapping fizgig. From time to time she positively only had to snatch off her amice to be a birdface and to have put Pope John Kissmine and Orchids in mind of his Puerpetually Succourbusting Lady as she positively must have appeared on at least two probabionary occasions: primo, skewered, there's no other word for it, to her loggia by the shining gynaecologist; secundo, confined, by Thermidor, in the interests of her armpits, to her bathroom, shamed in mind, yes, and yet – grieving of the doomed olives. Well we must say and no offence meant, that class of egoterminal immaculate quackery and dupery gives us the sick if anything does. Whatever she was she was not that kind. We suppose we can say she looked like an ulula in pietra serena, a parrot in a Pietà. On occasions that is. Not we need scarcely point out in the helmet of salvation.

Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to middling Women