Page 133 - swanns-way

golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.
Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our
Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate ev-
ery commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them
by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land
watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures
and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you
embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by lit-
tle drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with
my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradu-
al crystallisation, slowly altering in form and dappled with
a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fra-
grant, limpid hours.
Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the mid-
dle of the afternoon, by the gardener’s daughter, who came
running like a mad thing, overturning an orange-tree in
its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming
out ‘They’re coming, they’re coming!’ so that Françoise and
I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That
was on days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went
out for some military exercise, going as a rule by the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde. While our servants, sitting in a row on
their chairs outside the garden railings, stared at the people
of Combray taking their Sunday walks and were stared at
in return, the gardener’s daughter, through the gap which
there was between two houses far away in the Avenue de la
Gare, would have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants
then hurried in with their chairs, for when the troopers
filed through the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from

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