Swann's Way

manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as
one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a
metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our
modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George
Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms
of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use
and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as
she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or
some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on
the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys
through the realms of time.

Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen _François le Champi_, whose
reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality
in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real
novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist.
That prepared me in advance to imagine that _François le Champi_
contained something inexpressibly delicious. The course of the