Proust etc.

My dear corncrake! Chapeaux off to you indeed! One small correction: frangipane means powdered or ground almonds, often mixed with fine sugar. Akin to marzipane, but dry. Etamine can be a fine sieve in cooking, but also refers to gauzy feminine garments, either chemises or gowns (think Josephine in those transparent Empire frocks). My guess is that it here refers to the finely woven altar-cloth (I have Proust in English right up there on the shelf, but I'm not going to look unless you tell me exactly where this is). Wayman's Garden Encyclopedia comes to the rescue: Nymphaea (nim-FEE-a) A genus of hardy and tropical water-lilies belonging to the Water-lily Family, with rounded leaves floating on the surface of the water (sometimes colored underneath) and with flowers floating on the surface or standing a few inches above the water; flowers white, yellow, pink, red or blue, with many variations in the gorgeously flowered hybrids. Some bloom during the day, some at night. The fruits are usually borne under the water. (This is quite lyrical for old Wayman.) -alga

OK, I didn't look that up. I may have got confused with the older english for marzipan, marchpane, which is no more like the french than the modern word, but different enough to confuse me, which tends to be quite easy.

Aha, this sounds more in the right direction; Cassells didn't have this either. For orientation, we are in the `Combray' part of Swann's Way (this edition goes straight into Combray, there's no separate `Ouverture', i.e. the first sentences of Combray is `Longtemps, je me suis couch'e de bonne heure'), which lasts from about page 90 (after a long introduction) to about page 300, where Swann in Love starts --- the Guermantes Way business is right before that, and the stuff I quoted lies between pages 217 and 281 (as I gave them). The English may well have a resum'e too, I think mine did.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to what these were doing in the Vivonne, then, but I switched off in exhaustion after `nenuphar'. corncrake