Swann's Way
outpouring of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it;
her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old
stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost
pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight
and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly
far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks
into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.
It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which shaped and crowned and
consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every point of view
in the town. From my bedroom window I could discern no more than its
base, which had been freshly covered with slates; but when on Sundays I
saw these, in the hot light of a summer morning, blaze like a black sun
I would say to myself: "Good heavens! nine o'clock! I must get ready for
mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Léonie first,"
and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the
Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade behind
the blinds of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way
to mass, penetrating its odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a
handkerchief or something, of which the draper himself would let her see
what he had, bowing from the waist: who, having made everything ready
for shutting up, had just gone into the back shop to put on his Sunday
coat and to wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes
and even on the saddest occasions, to rub one against the other with an
air of enterprise, cunning, and success.
And again, after mass, when we looked in to tell Théodore to bring a
larger loaf than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the
fine weather to come over from Thiberzy for luncheon, we had in front of
us the steeple, which, baked and brown itself like a larger loaf still
of 'holy bread,' with flakes and sticky drops on it of sunlight, pricked
its sharp point into the blue sky. And in the evening, as I came in from
my walk and thought of the approaching moment when I must say good night
to my mother and see her no more, the steeple was by contrast so kindly,
there at the close of day, that I would imagine it as being laid, like a
brown velvet cushion, against--as being thrust into the pallid sky which
had yielded beneath its pressure, had sunk slightly so as to make room
for it, and had correspondingly risen on either side; while the cries of
the birds wheeling to and fro about it seemed to intensify its silence,
to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with some quality
beyond the power of words.
Even when our errands lay in places behind the church, from which it
could not be seen, the view seemed always to have been composed with
reference to the steeple, which would stand up, now here, now there,
among the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared
thus without the church. And, indeed, there are many others which
look best when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of
housetops with surmounting steeples in quite another category of art
than those formed by the dreary streets of Combray. I shall never
forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming
eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons,
between which, when one looks up at them from a fine garden which
descends in terraces to the river, the gothic spire of a church (itself
hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and
completing their fronts, but in a material so different, so precious, so
beringed, so rosy, so polished, that it is at once seen to be no more
a part of them than would be a part of two pretty pebbles lying side
by side, between which it had been washed on the beach, the purple,
crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with
glossy colour. Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I
know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even
a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell,
sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the
atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact,
nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this
view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But
since into none of these little etchings, whatever the taste my
memory may have been able to bring to their execution, was it able to
contribute an element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not
merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature
without parallel, so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole
section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the
steeple of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw
it at five o'clock when going to call for letters at the post-office,
some doors away from one, on the left, raising abruptly with its
isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or again, when one had to go in
and ask for news of Mme. Sazerat, one's eyes followed the line where it
ran low again beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing
further afield one went to the station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in
profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some
unknown point in its revolution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the
apse, drawn muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed
to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to hurl its
spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was always to the steeple that
one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up
the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger
of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of
human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with
them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter
of Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on
the right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of
a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical
cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only
find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and
the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone
astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I
had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing
still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless,
trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed
from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it
again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now,
I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a
corner... but... the goal is in my heart...
On our way home from mass we would often meet M. Legrandin, who,
detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could
only (except in the regular holiday seasons) visit his home at Combray
between Saturday evenings and Monday mornings. He was one of that class
of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have
proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different
kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the
specialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation
profits. More 'literary' than many 'men of letters' (we were not aware
at this period that M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer,
and so were greatly astonished to find that a well-known composer
had set some verses of his to music), endowed with a greater ease
in execution than many painters, they imagine that the life they are
obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they
bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or
a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.
Tall, with a good figure, a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair
moustaches, a look of disillusionment in his blue eyes, an almost
exaggerated refinement of courtesy; a talker such as we had never heard;
he was in the sight of my family, who never ceased to quote him as an
example, the very pattern of a gentleman, who took life in the noblest
and most delicate manner. My grandmother alone found fault with him for
speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not using
a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Lavallière neckties, his
short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was astonished, too, at
the furious invective which he was always launching at the aristocracy,
at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'--"undoubtedly," he would say,
"the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of the sin for
which there is no forgiveness."
Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable
of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to
apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in not
very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country
gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such
violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution
for not having guillotined them all.
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are
lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris,
to squeeze back into my niche.
"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical,
disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in
my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great
patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above
your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in
you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of
what it needs."
When, on our reaching the house, my aunt would send to ask us whether
Mme. Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us could inform
her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that there was
a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the
Bad. Françoise was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned
empty-handed owing to the absence of Théodore, whose dual profession of
choirman, with a part in the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's
assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but
an encyclopaedic knowledge of their affairs.
"Ah!" my aunt would sigh, "I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She
is really the only person who will be able to tell me."
Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had 'retired' after
the death of Mme. de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service
from her childhood, and had then taken a room beside the church, from
which she would incessantly emerge, either to attend some service,
or, when there was no service, to say a prayer by herself or to give
Théodore a hand; the rest of her time she spent in visiting sick persons
like my aunt Léonie, to whom she would relate everything that had
occurred at mass or vespers. She was not above adding occasional
pocket-money to the little income which was found for her by the family
of her old employers by going from time to time to look after the Curé's
linen, or that of some other person of note in the clerical world of
Combray. Above a mantle of black cloth she wore a little white coif that
seemed almost to attach her to some Order, and an infirmity of the