I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite
creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the
disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern
in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue
evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when,
all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played
(lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's
_Dream_) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic
perfume.
Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Francoise with
the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside her
in a basket; sitting with a mournful air, as though all the sorrows of the
world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which capped the
asparagus shoots above their pink jackets would be finely and separately
outlined, star by star, as in Giotto's fresco are the flowers banded about
the brows, or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua. And,
meanwhile, Francoise would be turning on the spit one of those chickens,
such as she alone knew how to roast, chickens which had wafted far abroad
from Combray the sweet savour of her merits, and which, while she was
serving them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness
predominate for the moment in my private conception of her character; the
aroma of that cooked flesh, which she knew how to make so unctuous and so
tender, seeming to me no more than the proper perfume of one of her many
virtues.
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