then, turning towards us, with a physicianly finger raised in
warning, he resumed the consultation: "No Balbec before you are fifty!"
he called out to me, "and even then it must depend on the state of the
heart."

My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured
him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly
swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth
of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would
have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative--but an honourable
occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have
constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower
Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own
sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged
to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never
have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain--as,
from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to
have been certain--that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have
dreamed of making use of it.

* * *

We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Leonie
a visit before dinner. In the first weeks of our Combray holidays, when
the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned
into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the western sky from the
windows of the house and a band of purple at the foot of the Calvary,
which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow which,
accompanied often by a cold that burned and stung, would associate
itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very
moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the
poetic pleasure I had found in my walk, with the sensual pleasures of
good feeding, warmth and rest. But in summer, when we came back to the
house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our
visit to aunt Leonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along
her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner
curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay
with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers,
illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting,
shadowed beams that fall amo