So this book which my mother had read aloud to me in Combray until it was almost morning had retained for me all the wonder of that night. It is true that the “pen” of George Sand, to use an expression of Brichot’s, who was so fond of saying that a book had been written “with a nimble pen,” did not at all seem to me, as it had seemed so long ago to my mother before she slowly began to model her literary tastes on mine, a magical pen. But it was a pen which, without meaning to, I had charged with electricity, as schoolboys often do for fun, and now a thousand insignificant details from Combray,
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