ing 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. 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.

In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might
displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when
alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good
for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it
would make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she
was liable; besides, in the l