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
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
skin had stained part of her cheeks and her crooked nose the bright red
colour of balsam. Her visits were the one great distraction in the life
of my aunt Léonie, who now saw hardly anyone else, except the reverend
Curé. My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from
her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her eyes,
of falling into one or other of the two categories of people she most
detested. One group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid
herself first, consisted of those who advised her not to take so much
care of herself, and preached (even if only negatively and with no
outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting
smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two dreadful sips
of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours!) than all her medicine
bottles and her bed. The other category was composed of people who
appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought,
in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said. And so none of those
whom she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation
and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their visit
had shewn how unworthy they were of the honour which had been done them
by venturing a timid: "Don't you think that if you were just to stir out
a little on really fine days...?" or who, on the other hand, when she
said to them: "I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!"
had replied: "Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may
last a while yet"; each party alike might be certain that her doors
would never open to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look
of consternation on my aunt's face whenever she saw, from her bed, any
of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit, who looked as if they were
coming to see her, or heard her own door-bell ring, she would laugh far
more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt's devices (which never
failed) for having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture
when they had to turn back without having seen her; and would be filled
with secret admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior
to all these other people, inasmuch as she could and did contrive not to
see them. In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that
whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate
with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery.
In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in
a minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times
Eulalie would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme.
Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only
yesterday." For one of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the
formidable list of corrections which her experience must have compiled
was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme.
Sazerin.
"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she
preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.