Charnel house city: the covered markets that are rotting away
Noisy or deserted city, pallid or hysterical city, gutted, devastated, soiled city, city bristling with prohibitions, steel bars, iron fences, locks.
They would go on for hours, sometimes, in high dudgeon at its outrageousness.
These older, more autochthonous inhabitants of his soul absorbed all Swann’s strength, for a while, in that obscure task of reparation which gives one an illusory sense of repose during convalescence, or after an operation
The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil was still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants
