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and continuity makes the church for the Narrator ‘an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth being Time’ (SW, 71; 57). In the original text we catch an echo here between the ‘edifice occupant … un espace à quatre dimensions’ and the ‘edifice immense du souvenir’ said to be founded on the sensation of taste in the madeleine scene quoted above. The right trigger permits the revelation of the edifice built within us by our past experience; the church is a tangible structure whose ‘fourth dimension’ offers a way of understanding how time can be embodied. When in Time Regained the Narrator comes to the realization that he can write, a cathedral features among the analogies he draws on to suggest how his novel will be constructed (TR, 432; 2390)

‘Combray II’ chronicles the habits and customs of the Narrator’s family and their acquaintances. Aunt Léonie is an aged hypochondriac who no longer leaves her bedroom, from whose window she obsessively comments on what she sees, her limited perspective supplemented by reports from the outside provided by Françoise. Her existence is determined entirely by Habit, the daily and weekly routines on whose rhythm her life depends. Françoise has been in Léonie’s service for many years and the Narrator’s image of her ‘framed in the small doorway … like the statue of a saint in her niche’ (SW, 61; 51) is in keeping with the (albeit superficial) religiosity of her mistress and communicates the child Narrator’s view of Françoise as a paragon of virtue.

The scales fall from his eyes, however, when he witnesses her engaged in the less than saintly business of killing a recalcitrant chicken for the family table, her exertions accompanied by cries of ‘Filthy creature!’ Thus disabused of the illusion that a person might have a single, indivisible character, the Narrator begins to realize that Françoise’s virtues ‘concealed many of these kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens … portrayed as kneeling with their hands joined in prayer in the windows of churches were stained by oppression and bloodshed’ (SW, 145; 104). The image here is characteristically democratic: servants and sovereigns are as morally fallible as each other, an insight to which the Narrator returns elsewhere in the Search.

The ‘Combray’ sections of Swann’s Way, then, combine fond reflection on old habits with, as so often in childhood, a recurring pattern of illusions being displaced by unexpected discoveries. Family conventions and commonplaces – Léonie’s habits and her feud with Eulalie; the father’s barometer readings; walks on the Guermantes Way when the weather is fine; lunching early on a Saturday – are sociological studies as well as valuable lessons in how our experience of time and space is far from constant or uniform.

Discoveries and part-revelations abound: an unannounced visit to his Uncle Adolphe acquaints the Narrator with the bewitching ‘lady in pink’ (SW, 92–3; 71), subsequently revealed to be Odette de Crécy (later Mme Swann), a meeting which causes a rift in the family. Legrandin’s highly variable attitude to the Narrator’s family, depending on whose company he is in, reveals his snobbery, a vice against which he disingenuously rails. Homosexuality and sadism are revealed at Montjouvain when the Narrator voyeuristically witnesses Mlle Vinteuil, the daughter of the old piano teacher, with her lover. And Mme de Guermantes, whose beauty and mystique the Narrator had woven in his mind around the syllables of her name, is revealed, after great anticipation, to be no more other-worldly than ‘the wives of doctors and tradesmen’, as the ‘fiery little spot at the corner of her nose’ deflatingly attests (SW, 210; 144).

These scenes introduce many of the novel’s central characters and themes, which develop at different rates as the novel progresses. Questions of class distinctions, snobbery and social aspiration are further explored in ‘Swann in Love’ and given their fullest treatment in The Guermantes Way. The Montjouvain scene prepares