In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

“You were taking me for mamma, I know I’m getting to look exactly like her,” and I recognised Gilberte.

the unintelligibleness resulting from my conversation with this young woman owing to our having lived in a particular society at an interval of twenty-five years, impressed me with the importance of history and may have strengthened my own sense of it.

More than one of the persons whom this afternoon party had collected or whose memory it evoked, provided me with the successive appearances he had presented under widely dissimilar circumstances. The individual rose before me again as he had been and, in doing so, called forth the various aspects of my own life, like different perspectives in a countryside where a hill or a castle seems at one moment to be to the right, at another to the left, to dominate a forest or emerge from a valley, thus reminding the traveller of changes of direction and altitude in the road he has been following. As I went further and further back I finally discovered pictures of the same individual, separated by such long intervals, represented by such distinct personalities, with such different meanings that, as a rule, I eliminated them from my field of recollection when I believed I had made contact with them, and often ceased believing they were the same people I had formerly known.

Mme de Guermantes, in her decline, had felt new curiosities rising within her. Society had nothing more to give her.

I knew that the leaden grey of his hard, worn cheeks, the woolly whiteness of his unkempt hair, the wavering light which lingered in his almost unseeing eyes, were the but too real pigment borrowed from a fantastic palette with which was inimitably painted the prophetic shadows of age and the terrifying proximity of death.

There was another story: “One day I was in the Champs Elysées. M. de Bréauté, whom I had only seen once, looked at me so significantly that I stopped and asked him how he dared look at me like that. He answered: ‘I’m looking at you because you’ve got an absurd hat on.’ It was true. It was a little hat with pansies on it and the fashions of that period were awful. But I was furious and I said to him: ‘I don’t permit you to talk to me like that.’ It began to rain and I said: ‘I might forgive you if you had a carriage.’ ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, I’ve got one and I’ll accompany you home.’ ‘No, I shall be glad to accept your carriage but not you.’ I got into the carriage and he departed in the rain.

boeuf à la mode,

jelly was enriched by many additional carefully selected bits of meat?