The end of Swann's Way: Types of memory in Proust

At the end of "Swann's Way" Proust establishes a very different mood, which is almost the opposite and certainly a counterpoint to the mood he established in the opening section, Combray: In Combray, he begins with a richly embued, nostalgic recollection of the past, of his childhood, recalled from much later in life, a time when he had shut everything aside and sought only quiet and memory - he does not really describe himself as an old man, but just lets the childhood memories stream forward, and you could almost think you're beginning to read a conventional novel in which the narrator/protagonist tells his life story from childhood onward - Tom Jones, Pip, Augie March - except that the prose is so strange and the memories so vivid and complex and you gradually realize you're not reading a novel at all but more of an examination of the nature and power of memory and of language itself. At the end, we get another kind of literary trope, also conventional to a degree, but also unique to Proust because of his treatment of the material - in the short final section the young Marcel (narrator) walks with his governess, Francoise, in the Bois (Paris park) and encounters the beautiful older woman Odette (we now know she has married Swann - I'd forgotten that - and that Gilberte is her daughter). Marcel bows to her, an awkward and comic moment. Then, he walks through the Bois many years later, an old man (not really so old) and the park of course appears to him as a completely different environment, strange and "unnatural," very human-made (like most French parks or gardens, in my opinion), and he reflects once again on memory and loss - but this time not a memory that comes upon him unbidden, like a wave crashing, but a summoned memory, an attempt to recapture the past, painful as it may be - which will inspire him as he continues with these volumes.