If I went down to see her for a moment…and found her enclouded in the mists of a dress of grey crêpe de Chine, I accepted this appearance, which I felt to be due to complex causes and unchangeable, I let myself be swept into the atmosphere it created, like that of certain late afternoons muffled in a pearl-grey floating mist. If, on the other hand, the chosen gown were Chinese with a pattern of red and yellow flames, I saw it as a brilliant sunset; these costumes were not a trivial decoration which could have been replaced by any other, but an inescapable reality, poetic in the same way as the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain time of day.
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 25
Weather and women as fatalism.
