I understood only too well that what the sensation of the uneven flagstones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine, had awoken within me bore no relation to what I was trying to remember about Venice, about Balbec and about Combray, with the help of a uniform memory; and I understood that life might be deemed dreary, even though at certain moments it may seem so beautiful, because for the most part it is on the basis of something quite different from it, on the basis of images which retain nothing of life itself, that we judge it and that we disparage it.
