Girl In Hyacinth Blue

“Someone at the table remarked about Merrill’s cryptic last words, ‘love enough,’ words that now sting me as much as any indictment of my complicity or encouragement, but they didn’t then.” 

Though Cornelius thinks this passage at the beginning of the chapter, he is looking back on the atrocity of his ways and how his greed for the painting was anything but an expression of loving enough. Merrill is the dead headmaster at the school where Cornelius teaches, and his last words, “love enough,” are the foundation upon which this book rests. Can one love enough throughout their lifetime? And what happens when it’s not possible due to circumstances or personality? These questions become the pillars to Vreeland’s main theme of the love of art and its relationship to human love. 

“Still the evidence was in the museums—the similarities were undeniable. He flew home, hoarding conviction like a stolen jewel.” 

The simile at the end of this quote, “like a stolen jewel” is important; Cornelius “hoarding” conviction is emblematic of his need to be right that this painting is a Vermeer. It also tells readers something about his personality; he is greedy and covetous. After flying to Amsterdam to find some kind of proof, he convinces himself that the other Vermeers prove his is genuine. Somehow, as the stealing of a Jewel connotes, Cornelius can continue to love this painting, despite its theft from a Jewish home during the Holocaust. Hoarders, the word implies, are not conscious of what they hoard because greed interferes with common sense and personal ethics.