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Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel, In Search of Lost Time, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed narrator recalls his experiences while growing up in the home of his aunt and uncle. This novel is notable for its profound psychological insight and the author's reflections on the nature of art and time.

Read more about Marcel Proust

More works by Marcel Proust

Within a Budding Grove
(1919)

Swann's Way

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-Célestins, 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 Françoise.

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

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Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

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