Swann's Way
kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly
corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker's
and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a mountain of rosy
snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen the
window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like
a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illumined
by a sunrise--the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of the
altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for
a moment by a light shining from outside and shortly to be extinguished
than painted and permanently fastened on the stone. And all of them
were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity
sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare
brilliance the very cords of their lovely tapestry of glass. There
was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little
rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience
of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a
ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision
had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled
by turns, a rare and transient fire--the next instant it had taken on
all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a
flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of
the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were
along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was
following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped
in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the
deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on
some enormous breastplate; but beyond which could be distinguished,
dearer than all such treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which
could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in
which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the
straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came
down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness
of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime
in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded
carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.
Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in
which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the
features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of
Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one
another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch
of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the
yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have
acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding
atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in silk
and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the
top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing
upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong
rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these,
the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me
were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was
said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons
of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way
to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with
amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little
people's supernatural passage--all these things made of the church for
me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building
which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space--the name of the
fourth being Time--which had sailed the centuries with that old nave,
where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant,
hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness
of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where,
near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful
gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up
sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves
smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger
brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked
down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting
down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault,
ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his
sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little
daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been
bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when
the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the
golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried
itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."
And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that? It was so
coarse, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the religious spirit. From
outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower
level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced
ashlar, jagged with flints, in all of which there was nothing
particularly ecclesiastical; the windows seemed to have been pierced at
an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall
rather than of a church. And certainly in later years, were I to recall
all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never enter my mind to
compare with any one of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day,
turning out of a little street in some country town, I came upon three
alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rubbed, worn,
crumbling, and unusually high; with windows pierced in it far overhead
and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that
moment I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at
Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been expressed in
its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed "The Church!"
The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the Rue
Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by its two neighbours,
Mme. Loiseau's house and the pharmacy of M. Rapin, against which its
walls rested without interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might
have had her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne
numbers, and at whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on
his morning rounds, before going into Mme. Loiseau's and after leaving
M. Rapin's, there existed, for all that, between the church and
everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of
demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind.
In vain might Mme. Loiseau deck her window-sills with fuchsias, which
developed the bad habit of letting their branches trail at all times
and in all directions, head downwards, and whose flowers had no more
important business, when they were big enough to taste the joys of life,
than to go and cool their purple, congested cheeks against the dark
front of the church; to me such conduct sanctified the fuchsias not at
all; between the flowers and the blackened stones towards which they
leaned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved the
impression of an abyss.
From a long way off one could distinguish and identify the steeple of
Saint-Hilaire inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon beneath
which Combray had not yet appeared; when from the train which brought
us down from Paris at Easter-time my father caught sight of it, as it
slipped into every fold of the sky in turn, its little iron cock veering
continually in all directions, he would say: "Come, get your wraps
together, we are there." And on one of the longest walks we ever took
from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly
on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over
which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple,
but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched
on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a
landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this
single indication of human existence. As one drew near it and could make
out the remains of the square tower, half in ruins, which still stood by
its side, though without rivalling it in height, one was struck, first
of all, by the tone, reddish and sombre, of its stones; and on a misty
morning in autumn one would have called it, to see it rising above the
violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the
colour of the wild vine.
Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop
to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two and two, one pair
above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing
to which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released,
it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little
while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed
them to sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden
uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had
struck them and driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the
violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return
and be absorbed in the tower, deadly no longer but benignant, some
perching here and there (not seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and
swallowing some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull
perches, with an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave. Without
quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire
that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her
love--and deem rich in beneficent influences--nature itself, when the
hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and
the works of genius. And certainly every part one saw of the church
served to distinguish the whole from any other building by a kind of
general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in the steeple that
the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its
individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple which spoke for
the church. I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found in
the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the
world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of
architecture, she would say:
"My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful,
but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it
could play the piano, I am sure it would really _play_." And when she
gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent
inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like
hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the