Are there names that have fascinated you from your childhood, names which you heard spoken but which didn’t match any real person of your acquaintance or any place you actually knew, names which little by little began to contain their own unique aura around which you wove a brilliant but imaginary world?

Such names, unlike the other vocabulary we learn as children, don’t carry any meaning we can easily understand. We can’t see the object to which they refer or easily grasp the idea they embody. We have to invent a story for them.

Many of the people and places mentioned in my hearing as a child seemed like a foreign language that needed to be deciphered. My child’s mind sought to translate them in some accessible way, and that translation was often done by means of images. My mother’s uncle James whom she often spoke about but whom I never met or even saw in a photograph, became, in my mind’s eye, a figure in a dark suit, white shirt and check tie. But this soberly dressed figure had the head of a large brown bear. Every time she spoke of him, I saw that same besuited bear, sometimes with a foot propped on the pedal of his bicycle, always with a hat on the back of his head. That was Uncle James.

The images in my head were mostly invented but sometimes supported by the tiny, faded oval of whiteness peering out of an old photograph. My father’s great-aunt Ann was such a white oval. But there wasn’t much to latch onto in the blankness of the little face. The rest of the photo was more promising; it showed a dark figure in a wide-brimmed hat, long dress and laced up boots, her feet turned out like Mary Poppins. So I endowed the dark figure with an umbrella and at the mention of her name, the sky gained a new type of bird as Aunt Ann floated off among the clouds.

Names, both place names and people’s names have dominated Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu from the very beginning. The name Guermantes fascinated the young narrator from early childhood. He endowed it with its own colour, he linked it to the historical fables of the region he lived in, he created images for himself around the name based on the colored figures in the stained glass windows of his local church and the glimpse he once had of a woman who bore the name Guermantes and who embodied for him a kind of ultimate perfection. In this, the third volume of the series, the narrator and the reader finally get to meet the Duchesse de Guermantes in all her imagined splendour. And she is splendid indeed.

I have my own set of images inspired by the stained glass windows of the church of my childhood where the main theme was Judgement Day. The images I have are partly linked to what I'd learned at school but they take a turn that the nuns who taught us never gave the story. The mass of monotone sinners on the redeemer's left-hand side get transformed by the light into an array of colorful personages that more than rival the red and gold saints on his right-hand side. I think Proust might have approved.