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Updated: May 26, 2025
A club was formed, of all the passengers, which met in the writing school after prayers and read aloud about the countries we were approaching and discussed the information so obtained. Several times the photographer of the expedition brought out his transparent pictures and gave us a handsome magic-lantern exhibition.
Lakody first exhibited a magic-lantern, and afterwards, with the assistance of the students, acted a play called Dr. Faust translated from Goethe by Lakody himself, though Goethe himself would scarce have recognized his own masterpiece.
The whole seemed as if passing before him in a magic-lantern, and when at length, recalled to himself by the amazement expressed upon the countenances of both ladies, he ventured to ask his beautiful fiancée for her hand in the dance, it was no wonder that she did not recognize his voice, so choked and husky was it with emotion.
Our talk was long and various, and the subject-matter of it did not tend to dispel the illusion that we were by means of some strange magic-lantern taking a peep into a resuscitated bit of the old cinquecento art-life, so full were the mind and heart of the artist of the special art-glories of his native city.
You will rejoice, I am sure, my dear Sophy, to see by the date of this letter that we are safe back at Edgeworthstown. The scenes we have gone through for some days past have succeeded one another like the pictures in a magic-lantern, and have scarcely left the impression of reality upon the mind. It all seems like a dream, a mixture of the ridiculous and the horrid.
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.
It was only a sinuous perspective of sunlit ripples twinkling between wooded gardens and open meadows, a fisherman or two upon the tow-path, a canoe in mid-stream, a gaunt church crowning all against the sky. But inset in such surroundings it was like a flash from a magic-lantern in a coal-cellar.
And then, as in the swift change of magic-lantern slides, this savage scene, this worn-out symbol of a splendid and subtle liturgy, stammered out in a hoarse voice, disappeared, giving way to the solemn array of Levites and priests marching in procession under the guidance of Aaron, resplendent in his turban with the crown of gold above it, in his purple robe, on its hem the open pomegranates of scarlet and blue, with tinkling bells of gold; and he wore the linen ephod, girt with a girdle, blue and purple and scarlet, and kept in its place by shoulder-pieces fastened with onyx stones, his breastplate in a blaze, flashing sparks that lighted up as he moved in the twelve gems of the breastplate.
And at home a magic-lantern filled with the splendours of the New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for a time. 'Well said; and what else? This is excellent; and what else? Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven. 'There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle your eyes to look on them.
The ding-ding-dong of the bells of Notre Dame fails to move you; and just now when the magic-lantern passed beneath the window, I looked at you while pretending to work, and you were quite calm." "I remain calm when the magic-lantern is going by! Ah! my dear, you are very severe on me, and really "
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