Gears (May)

Re-reading Proust. “I heard her snoring lightly. I was going to go away quietly, but the noise I had made had probably interfered with her sleep and made it ‘shift gears’, as they say about cars, because the music of her snoring broke off for a second and resumed on a lower note…” She is Marcel’s reclusive aunt, Léonie. Comic anachronism is disarming. The first mention of an automobile reminds us the story opens before their popularisation. Until now things were “reined in”; the coach awaited; people took long walks in May sunshine. Léonie probably never travelled in a car.