the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a present of one
of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value
is the creator's intention and his signature. To have left even the
tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as much discourtesy as to
rise and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was still being played,
and under the composer's-very eyes.

At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day;
you can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little
fresh air first; don't start reading immediately after your food."

And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented
here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander, which modelled
upon a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its slender,
allegorical body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a
lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which communicated, by
a service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected
soil rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house itself and
apparently a separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see
its red-tiled floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the
cave of Francoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing
with the offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come
sometimes from distant villages to dedicate here the first-fruits of
their fields. And its roof was always surmounted by the cooing of a
dove.

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 h