While the dance or merry-go-round of life, seen through allegories of the seasons, or human attributes and ambitions, or toys from the attic of myth, like Phoebus's chariot, is all a-quiver in the Poussin, there was also a precedent, again French, for "dodging the artificiality of the invented ‘hero' who speaks for the author."

Powell never blurs or hurries over his admiration for Proust. In more than one essay, he describes Proust as the greatest French novelist. His true Penelope was never Flaubert. A whole section of his book Miscellaneous Verdicts, Writing on Writers 1946-1989, is entitled "Proust and Proustian Matters". Even more compelling, the narrator of Dance, Nick Jenkins himself, brings his "onlie begetter" on stage. In The Military Philosophers, third book of the wartime trilogy, Jenkins has escaped working under Widmerpool. Promoted acting major, he finds himself shepherding diverse, fractious and exiled military allies through northern France during the autumn after D-Day. He comes close to tears when he discovers that a seemingly nondescript seaside town, bourn of worrying chores for a staff officer told to find appropriate billets for tired men and status-conscious officers, has turned out to be Cabourg. Cabourg is Proust's Balbec: the Normandy resort of the Narrator's family holidays. Here is the passage:

Cobb was making notes in a little book.  Marinko gazed out of the window, overcome with Slav melancholy, or, more specifically — being of the party that supported the Resistance groups of Mihcilovic — dejection at the course British policy appeared to be taking in that connexion.

"Just spell out the name of that place we stopped over last night, Major Jenkins," said Cobb.

"C-A-B-O-U-R-G, Sir."

As I uttered the last letter, scales fell from my eyes. Everything was transformed. It all came back-like the tea-soaked madeleine itself — in a torrent of memory ... Cabourg ... We had just driven out of Cabourg ... out of Proust's Balbec.  Only a few minutes before, I had been standing on the esplanade along which, wearing her polo cap and accompanied by the little band of girls he had supposed the mistresses of professional bicyclists, Albertine had strolled into Marcel's life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel's dining room — conveying for those without the sensation of staring into an aquarium — was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns. A little further along the promenade was the Casino, its walls still displaying tattered play-bills, just like the one Charlus, wearing his black straw hat, had pretended to examine, after an attempt at long range to assess the Narrator's physical attractions and possibilities. Here Elstir had painted; Prince Odoacer played golf. Where was the little railway line that had carried them all to the Verdurins' villa? Perhaps it ran in another direction to that we were taking; more probably it was no more.