Readers of Proust
will recall the preparation of asparagus in the first part of his "A la
recherche du temps perdu", and, more significantly and relevantly, the following
passage:
I would stop by the
table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to
inspect the platoons of
peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little
green marbles, ready for a
game; but what fascinated me would be the
asparagus, tinged with ultramarine
and rosy pink which ran from their
heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure,
through a series of
imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained
a little by the
soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not
of this world.
I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of
exquisite
creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who,
through the
disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to
discern
in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these
blue
evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again
when,
all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they
played
(lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in
Shakespeare's
_Dream_) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of
aromatic
perfume.
A.
Bouazza.