{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1726",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1726,
    "subject": "Proust, etc.",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-07-27T10:15:32+00:00",
    "last": "1999-07-27T10:15:32+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0030@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alice Turner",
        "address": "akt at ibm.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-07-27T10:15:32+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Proust, etc.",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Okay, I got it. Page 123 of the Montcrieff-Kilmartin (1981) translation.\nYour version:\n\n\n  On leaving the church I knelt down before the alter, and as I stood up I\n  smelled all of a sudden a bittersweet almond odour(*) escaping from the\n  hawthorns, and noticed on the flowers little places whiter than the rest,\n  on which I supposed this scent must be hidden like the taste of marzipan\n  under a dusting of breadcrumbs(**) or like the cheeks of Mlle Vinteuil\n  under their red freckles.  Despite the silent immobility of the\n  hawthorns, that intermittent scent was like the murmur of an intense\n  life which made the altar vibrate as a rural hedge probed by living\n  antennae where, on some stamens(***) which were almost red and which\n  seemed to have kept a springlike virulence, one thought to see the\n  provoking power of insects now metamorphosed into flowers.(****)\n\n(*) I get away with it this time.\n(**) I haven't done very well with `comme sous les parties gratinées le\n  goût d'une frangipane', but being culinary it was never really supposed\n  to be translated.\n(***) `étamines' can mean both `stamens' and `bunting'.  I have translated\n  it once each way; neither really seems right.\n(****) Phew.\n\nFor **, they have \"as the taste of an almond cake lay beneath the burned\nparts.\"\n\nFor ***, here's the whole sentence: \"Despite the motionless silence of the\nhawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of an\nintense organic life, with which the whole altar was quivering like a\nhedgerow explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some\nstamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime\nvirulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into\nflowers.\"\n\nWhew, indeed! But you seem to have been right about the stamens. All this\nbuzzing sensuality is more or less in contrast to the Vinteuil girl,\nwouldn't you say, who unlike MP himself has not apparently begun to feel the\nhormonal stirrings of adolescence. Then, a few pages later, there is\nFrancoise's grisly murder of the chicken! And after that Legrandin's carnal\nbuttocks!  And then, in an ecstasy of hawthorn (and other flowers, but\nmainly hawthorn)--Gilberte! My, my--bring on the smelling salts!\n\n-alga"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}