In earlier days I would not have lingered in the sacred grove which
surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I would steal
into the little sitting-room which my uncle Adolphe, a brother of my
grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a
major, used to occupy on the ground floor, a room which, even when its
opened windows let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun which
seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to emit that vague and yet
fresh odour, suggesting at once an open-air and an old-fashioned kind of
existence, which sets and keeps the nostrils dreaming when one goes into a
disused gun-room. But for some years now I had not gone into my uncle
Adolphe's room, since he no longer came to Combray on account of a quarrel
which had arisen between him and my family, by my fault, and in the
following circumstances: Once or twice every month, in Paris, I used to be
sent to pay him a. visit, as he was finishing his luncheon, wearing a
plain alpaca coat, and waited upon by his servant in a working-jacket of
striped linen, purple and white. He would complain that I had not been to
see him for a long time; that he was being neglected; he would offer me a
marchpane or a tangerine, and we would cross a room in which no one ever
sat, whose fire was never lighted, whose walls were picked out with gilded
mouldings, its ceiling painted blue in imitation of the sky, and its
furniture upholstered in satin, as at my grandparents', only yellow; then
we would enter what he called his 'study,' a room whose walls were hung
with prints which shewed, against a dark background, a plump and rosy
goddess driving a car, or standing upon a globe, or wearing a star on her
brow; pictures which were popular under the Second Empire because there
was thought to be something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were
then generally despised, and which now people are beginning to collect
again for one single and consistent reason (despite any others which they
may advance), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire.
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