My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great-aunt--with whom we used to
stay, was the mother of that aunt Leonie who, since her husband's (my
uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed; and who
now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of
grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious
observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue Saint-Jacques, which
ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pre (as distinct from the
Petit-Pre, a green space in the centre of the town where three streets
met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three high steps of stone
before almost every one of its doors, seemed like a deep furrow cut by
some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of stone out of which he
had fashioned a Calvary or a Crib. My aunt's life was now practically
confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the
afternoon while they, aired the other. They were rooms of that country
order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are
illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see)
fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours springing from
their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life,
invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere
holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured by
circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already
humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid jelly,
blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the
store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic
smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet
savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving
smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase
of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to
the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived amongst
them.
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