Swann's Way

its red-tiled floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the
cave of Françoise 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,