“Only sunlight, perfumes, colours, seemed to me to have any value … I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence,... Bayeux, so lofty in its noble coronet of russet lacework, whose pinnacle was illumined by the old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter;... Questambert ... ridiculous and naïve ... Quimperlé, more firmly attached ... among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver ... ”

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way