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April 2 - July 11, 2025
were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter,
as though it were along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped in their hands;
it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.
occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which
which had sailed the centuries with that old nave,
the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother;
thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night,
were I to recall all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never enter my mind to compare with any one of them the apse of Combray.
I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been expressed in its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed "The Church!"
a simple citizen of Combray, who might have had her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne numbers, and at whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on his morning rounds,
between the flowers and the blackened stones towards which they leaned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved the impression of an abyss.
as it slipped into every fold of the sky in turn,
over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence.
the violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards,
with that right and original proportion in their spacing to which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity,
as a seagull perches, with an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave.
my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her love—and deem rich in beneficent influences—nature itself,
my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction.
the worn old stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.
to wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes and even on the saddest occasions, to rub one against the other with an air of enterprise, cunning, and success.
the steeple, which, baked and brown itself like a larger loaf still of 'holy bread,' with flakes and sticky drops on it of sunlight, pricked its sharp point into the blue sky.
an element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature without parallel,
my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again;
M. Legrandin,
who, detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer,
they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.
he was in the sight of my family, who never ceased to quote him as an example, the very pattern of a gentleman, who took life in the noblest and most delicate manner.
She was astonished, too, at the furious invective which he was always launching at the aristocracy, at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'—"undoubtedly," he would say, "the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of the sin for which there is no forgiveness."
this appears much later - rebounds on him, when marcel realises he IS in his heart of hearts a snob
she thought it in not very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,"
one or other of the two categories of people she most detested.
The other category was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said.
In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery.
the proud hour °f noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonorous crown,
a cream of chocolate, inspired in the mind, created by the hand of Françoise, would be laid before us, light and fleeting as an 'occasional piece' of music, into which she had poured the whole of her talent.
don't start reading immediately after your food."
its trough, ornamented here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander,
my uncle Adolphe, a brother of my grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a major,
people are beginning to collect again for one single and consistent reason (despite any others which they may advance), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire.
For in the end, after a supreme crisis of hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: "A quarter past two,"
At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of necessity,
Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the dreams with which these announcements filled my mind,
was the first of all its numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment.
from what I had been told of them I would arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
the sudden volatility which the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in which it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which the name of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of bradding and blossoming life.
the face of a woman who, I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her private life.
Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind.
Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in conversation, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother: "One of your uncle's friends,"
not daring to look too much in her direction, in case I should be obliged to speak to her,
since his difficulties with my grandfather, he had endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any association of his family with this other class of acquaintance.
