le grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but
beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms
among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden
roses--marking, as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place
of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree
which had and those which had not been 'in bloom'--shewed me that these
were petals which, before their flowering-time, the chemist's package
had embalmed on warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still
their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life
which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower.
Presently my aunt was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she
would relish the savour of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of
which she would hold out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.

At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of
lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as pharmacy and as
high altar, on which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of
Vichy-Celestins, might be found her service-books and her medical
prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed,
of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and
for vespers. On the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she
had the street beneath her eyes, and would read in it from morning to
night to divert the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily
but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail
afterwards with Francoise.

I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would send me
away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad
brow, pale and lifeless, on which at this early hour she would not yet
have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone like the
points of a crown of thorns--or the beads of a rosary, and she would say
to me: "Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for
mass; and if you see Francoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too
long amusing herself with you; she must come up soon to see if I want
anything."

Francoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did not
at that time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to
ours, was a little inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we
spent in her house. Ther