In Search of Lost Time (2003)
In Search of Lost Time
“To live in, Combray was a little dreary, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackish stones of the countryside, fronted by outside steps, capped with gables that cast shadows down before them, were so dark that once the daylight began to fade one had to draw back the curtains in the ‘formal rooms’; streets with the solemn names of saints (of whom many were connected to the history of the earliest seigneurs of Combray): the rue Saint-Hilaire, the rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt’s house stood, the rue Sainte-Hildegarde, along which her railings ran, and the rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which opened the little side-gate of her garden; and these streets of Combray exist in a part of my memory so withdrawn, painted in colours so different from those that now coat the world for me, that in truth all of them, and also the church that rose above them on the Square, appear to me more unreal even than the projections of the magic lantern; and that at certain moments, it seems to me ...that to be able to cross the rue Saint-Hilaire again, to be able to take a room in the rue de l’Oiseau – at the old Hôtellerie de l’Oiseau Flesché, from whose basement windows rose a smell of cooking that now and then still rises in me as intermittently and as warmly – would be to enter into contact with the Beyond in a manner more marvellously supernatural than making the acquaintance of Golo or chatting with Genevieve de Brabant.MoreLess
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