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presence, her soothing voice, her kiss – is granted him, yet he cannot be fully happy for he realizes that the episode is unrepeatable. These complex moments combining fear, partially satisfied yearnings, enlightenment and disappointment provide vital lessons about temporality and desire, which shape his subsequent psychological development. The novel the mother reads to her agitated son brings an additional twist: George Sand’s François le Champi (1848) is the tale of a foundling brought up by a miller and his kindly wife, Madeleine; eventually hounded from the house by the cruel miller, François returns after the death of the latter and marries his adoptive mother. With this oedipal tale, inset in a scene that already suggests the transgression of conventional mother–son relations, the Narrator receives an ambiguous initiation into literature: he daydreams, his mother skips the love scenes, so his understanding is incomplete, it is a sensory impression, filtered through the calming sounds of his mother’s voice. In Time Regained (TR, 239–40; 2275–6) the Narrator enjoys moments of delight upon encountering a copy of the same book in the Prince de Guermantes’ library that stem not from memories stirred up by the text but from a sensory appreciation of the object itself.

Such was the trauma of his bedtimes and the emotional magnitude of the night just discussed that the adult Narrator feels ‘as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’ clock at night’ (SW, 50; 44). Until, that is, his contingent encounter much later in life with a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, an experience which stirs within him a sudden rush of ‘exquisite pleasure’ (SW, 51; 45). Just as forgotten words or names stubbornly refuse to reveal themselves to us when we will them to appear, taking more tea and cake provides no further insight: voluntary physical action is useless, as are his attempts to remember the movements of his mind at the moment he was overwhelmed. Slowly, something rising from a great depth starts or quivers within him (the French verb is ‘tressaillir’). Then the memory appears: his Aunt Léonie used to give him morsels of tea-soaked madeleine on Sunday mornings in Combray. The sight of the cakes was not sufficient to resurrect his past: this requires the more complex sensation of taste. ‘When from a long-distant past nothing subsists’, the Narrator explains,

after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, upon the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense structure of recollection [‘l’édifice immense du souvenir’]. (SW, 54, trans. mod.; 46)

And so memories of the rest of his childhood pour forth into the Narrator’s mind, yielding the crucial realization through his body that his present does bear a relation of continuity to his past, that he is the same person in the now of narration as in the then of the events he remembers.

Readers are well advised to linger over these pages, since echoes and transposed fragments of the episode are to be found dispersed throughout the novel. A detailed familiarity with key moments such as this permits us better to recognize and appreciate the novel’s constant through-flow of motifs and memories, the subtle allusions that bind disparate parts of the text together.

The church has a dominant position in the Combray topography and a vital symbolic role in the novel: the building is not just the centre of the provincial community, it is a place where past and present time intermingle. The Counts of Brabant lie buried beneath the flagstones and in the family chapel above them sit their ancestors, the present-day Guermantes, bathed in light filtering through the stained-glass windows that represent their forebears. This sense of duration