A Pastiche of Proust by Marc Lambron

In its 19 April edition, the Journal du Dimanche published this pastiche of Proust, written by Marc Lambron, of the Académie Française:

It was thus that on summer evenings at Combray, as I lay stretched out on the bed of the room which the rays of the sun had adorned during the day with a yellowing brilliance that still seemed to crown the objects with a scintillating halo like a dust of gold, I would hear the steps of maman climbing the staircase, which gave off a muffled sound in which the woody matter, softened by a floor covering of a mauve suavity, creaked gently beneath her familiar foot, reassuring and as it were avuncular, even though this was but a manner of speaking. She would come and station herself at my bedside, the mass of her hair caught in a lace snood tracing the profile one sees at Venice on the oriental princesses, ruddy and ochred, of Carpaccio, before taking up from the bedside table the familiar volume with its aged clasps, the Contes du pangolin, of which she would resume the reading at the page turned down the evening before, which already seemed to me to be receding into the memory of a time both recent and yet irremediably past. She had conceived for the adventures of this small tricuspid-scaled mammal an interest akin to that awakened by the sultanas of the Mille et Une Nuits, so much did the vicissitudes of the pangolin's life, combining with a courtesan's gentleness the warlike trappings that made me picture it caparisoned like a Carthaginian elephant armed for the warriors of Hamilcar Barca, infuse into my childish mind a languid, ethereal, soporific and as it were lethal torpor, which left maman free to hasten back down to the drawing room, where Swann had just arrived.

Marc Lambron