Swann's Way

to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered
above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the
projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be able
to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de
l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, from whose windows
in the pavement used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in
my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to
secure a contact with the unseen world more marvellously supernatural
than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with Geneviève
de Brabant.

My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great-aunt--with whom we used
to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband's (my
uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed;
and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite
condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions,
and religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue
Saint-Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as