mauve

Belize: Look at that heavy sky out there.
Louis: Purple.
Belize: Purple? What kind of a homosexual are you anyway? That’s not purple, Mary, that color out there… is mauve.

(from Angels in America)

"As I listened to these words of excuse, uttered as though she did not intend to come, I felt that, with the longing to see again the velvet-soft face which in the past, at Balbec, used to direct all my days towards the moment when, by the mauve September sea, I should be beside that roseate flower, a very different element was painfully endeavouring to combine."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 179 of the Modern Library paperback edition

Mauve is a bastard word to me. Doesn't fit the colour at all. See also puce.

Actually, it seems there's just enough variation in the colour world to satisfy me: this is mauve!

definition: a strong purple that is bluer and paler than monsignor