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Updated: May 6, 2025
To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows; streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood, the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me 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 Flesche, 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 Genevieve de Brabant.
This was the second time Licquet's attention had been attracted by the name of Mme. de Combray. He had already read it, incidentally, in the report of Flierlé's examination, and with the instinct of a detective, for whom a single word will often unravel a whole plot, he had a sudden intuition that in it lay the key to the entire affair.
D'Aché's absence spoiled his joy. He quite understood that without the latter, his triumph would be incomplete, his work would remain unfinished, and it was doubtless due to this torturing obsession that he owed the idea, as cruel as it was ingenious, of a new drama of which the old Marquise de Combray was again the victim.
But it was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncieres, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
The same evening the lawyer Lefebre, learned on reaching home, that Mme. de Combray had sent her gardener to ask him to come to her immediately in the Rue du Tripot. But worn out, he threw himself on his bed and slept soundly till some one knocked at his door about one in the morning. It was the gardener again, who was so insistent that Lefebre decided to go with him in spite of fatigue.
But as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse us by telling us the story of his latest adventure and he would have a fresh story for us on every occasion with some one whom we ourselves knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or our coachman.
She was not above adding occasional pocket-money to the little income which was found for her by the family of her old employers by going from time to time to look after the Cure's linen, or that of some other person of note in the clerical world of Combray.
Mme. de Combray feared no such dangers, and considered that "no one would be astonished to see 50,000 or 60,000 francs at her disposal." But she approved less of some other points in the affair, not that she was astonished to find her daughter compromised in such an adventure, for how many similar ones had she not helped to prepare in her Château of Tournebut?
In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray.
Of the château that had been built by the Marechal de Marillac, and considerably enlarged by Mme. de Combray, nothing, unhappily, remains but the out-buildings, a terrace overlooking the Seine, the court of honour turned into a lawn, an avenue of old limes and the ancient fence. A new building replaced the old one fifty years ago.
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