The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (12 page)

“I would have gone across to Camus …” Françoise would hazard, seeing that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.

“No, no; it’s not worth while now; it’s certainly the Pupin girl. My poor Françoise, I’m sorry to have brought you upstairs for nothing.”

But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one “didn’t know from Adam” was as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and indeed no one could remember, on the various occasions when one of these startling apparitions had occurred in the Rue du
Saint-Esprit or in the Square, exhaustive inquiries ever having failed to reduce the fabulous monster to the proportions of a person whom one “did know,” either personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to be Mme Sauton’s son back from military service, or the Abbé Perdreau’s niece home from her convent, or the Curé’s brother, a tax-collector at Châteaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holidays. They had on first appearance aroused the exciting thought that there might be in Combray people whom one “didn’t know from Adam,” simply because they had not been recognised or identified at once. And yet long beforehand Mme Sauton and the Curé had given warning that they expected their “strangers.” Whenever I went upstairs on returning home of an evening, to tell my aunt about our walk, if I was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the Pont-Vieux, a man whom my grandfather didn’t know: “A man grandfather didn’t know from Adam!” she would exclaim. “That’s a likely story.” None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news, would wish to have it cleared up, and so my grandfather would be summoned. “Who can it have been that you passed near the Pont-Vieux, uncle? A man you didn’t know from Adam?”

“Why, of course I knew him,” my grandfather would answer. “It was Prosper, Mme Bouillebœuf’s gardener’s brother.”

“Ah, good,” my aunt would say, reassured but slightly flushed; shrugging her shoulders and smiling ironically, she would add: “You see, he told me that you
passed a man you didn’t know from Adam!” After which I would be warned to be more circumspect in future, and not to upset my aunt so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to see a dog go by which she “didn’t know from Adam” she never stopped thinking about it, devoting all her inductive talents and her leisure hours to this incomprehensible phenomenon.

“That will be Mme Sazerat’s dog,” Françoise would suggest, without any real conviction, but in the hope of appeasement, and so that my aunt should not “split her head.”

“As if I didn’t know Mme Sazerat’s dog!” My aunt’s critical mind would not be fobbed off so easily.

“Well then, it must be the new dog M. Galopin brought back from Lisieux.”

“Oh, if that’s what it is!”

“They say he’s a very friendly animal,” Françoise would go on, having got the story from Théodore, “as clever as a Christian, always in a good temper, always friendly, always well-behaved. You don’t often see an animal so gentlemanly at that age. Mme Octave, I’ve got to leave you now; I haven’t time to dilly-dally; it’s nearly ten o’clock and my fire not lighted yet, and I’ve still got to scrape my asparagus.”

“What, Françoise, more asparagus! It’s a regular mania for asparagus you’ve got this year. You’ll make our Parisians sick of it.”

“No, no, Mme Octave, they like it well enough. They’ll be coming back from church soon as hungry as hunters, and they won’t turn their noses up at their asparagus, you’ll see.”

“Church! Why, they must be there now; you’d better not lose any time. Go and look after your lunch.”

While my aunt was gossiping on in this way with Françoise I accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved our church, and how clearly I can see it still! The old porch by which we entered, black, and full of holes as a colander, was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides (as also was the font to which it led us) just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress itself on the stone, to carve grooves in it like those made by cart-wheels upon stone gate-posts which they bump against every day. Its memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray who lay buried there furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins, here oozing out in a golden stream, washing from its place a florid Gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor, and elsewhere reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately distended. Its windows were never so sparkling as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you could be sure it would be fine inside the church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between earth and
heaven, and in whose slanting blue gleam, on weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more luxurious, with the sun showing off all its rich furnishings, had an almost habitable air, like the entrance hall—all sculptured stone and painted glass—of some hotel in the mediaeval style), you might see Mme Sazerat kneel for an instant, laying down on the seat next to hers a neatly corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker’s and was taking home for lunch. In another, a mountain of pink snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen against the very glass itself, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like a window to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, illumined by the light of dawn—the same, doubtless, that tinged the reredos of the altar with hues so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it momentarily 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 showing in its threadbare brilliance the texture of their lovely tapestry of glass. There was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little rectangular panes, of blue principally, like an enormous pack of cards 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 glance had sent shooting across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and flickering fire—the next instant it had taken on the shimmering brilliance of a
peacock’s tail, then quivered and rippled in a flaming and fantastic shower that streamed from the groin of the dark and stony vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some grotto glowing with sinuous stalactites that I was following my parents, who preceded me with their prayer-books clasped in their hands. A moment later the little lozenge panes had taken on the deep transparency, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on some enormous breastplate behind which, however, 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 soft, blue stream with which it bathed the jewelled windows, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we had come down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by quickening into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling, gilded carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.

There were two tapestries of high warp representing the coronation of Esther (tradition had 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), to which the colours, in melting into one another, had added expression, relief and light: a touch of pink over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the yellow of her dress was spread so unctuously, so thickly, as to have acquired a kind of solidity, and stood out boldly against the receding background; while the green of the trees, still bright in the lower parts of the panel of silk and wool, but quite “gone” at the top, brought out in a paler tone, above the
dark trunks, the yellowing upper branches, gilded and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong rays of an invisible sun.

All this, and still more 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 advance into the church, as we made our way to our seats, as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement in a rock, a tree, a pond, the tangible traces of the little people’s supernatural passage—all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it 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 cleft had been hollowed out by the tower staircase, and veiling it even there by the graceful Gothic arcades which crowded coquettishly around it like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a rustic, peevish and ill-dressed younger brother; raising up into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to see him still; and
thrusting down with its crypt into a Merovingian darkness, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, powerfully ribbed like an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore and his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep cavity, like the bed of a fossil, had been dug, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had detached itself, of its own accord, from the golden chains by which it was suspended on the site of the present apse and, with neither the crystal being broken nor the light extinguished, had buried itself in the stone, which had softly given way beneath it.”

And then the apse of Combray: what can one say of that? It was so crude, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling. From the 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 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, when I recalled all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never have occurred to me 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, rough-hewn 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 I might have done at Chartres or at Rheims, with what power the
religious feeling had been expressed therein, but instinctively I exclaimed: “The Church!”

The church! Homely and familiar, cheek by jowl in the Rue Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, with its two neighbours, Mme Loiseau’s house and M. Rapin’s pharmacy, against which its walls rested without interspace, a simple citizen of Combray, which might have had its 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, none the less, between the church and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which my mind has never succeeded in crossing. 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 stone against which they leaned, if my eyes could discern no gap, my mind preserved the impression of an abyss.

The steeple of Saint-Hilaire could be distinguished from a long way off, inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon against 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 weathercock veering in all directions, he would say:
“Come on, get your wraps together, we’re there.” And on one of the longest walks we used to take from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by a jagged ridge of forest above which rose the solitary point of Saint-Hilaire’s steeple, so slender and so pink that it seemed to be no more than scratched 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 see the remains of the square tower, half in ruins, which still stood by its side, though without rivalling it in height, one was struck most of all by the dark-red tone of its stones; and on a misty morning in autumn one might have thought it, rising above the violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the colour of Virginia creeper.