Sometimes it would
even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than
the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike;
something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the
fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had
stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden
bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence. Sweet Sunday
afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I
was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life,
replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land
watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions
to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue
of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on
with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual
crystallisation, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of
chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.
Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon, by
the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing, overturning an
orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming
out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that Francoise and I should run
too and not miss anything of the show.
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