The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a
silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a
sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly
still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I
had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good
day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the
sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire,
lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room
and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of
those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the
canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in
the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a
catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the
comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk
and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted
antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with
which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny
freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed
them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible
though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which,
barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable,
but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the
patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to
bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity
smell of the flowered quilt.
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