Page 175 - swanns-way

contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each
of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert
Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble,
its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its beams
had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it
was a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a
ruin which endures for all time. I would by now be dragging
my weary limbs, and ready to drop with sleep; the balmy
scent of the lime-trees seemed a consolation which I could
obtain only at the price of great suffering and exhaustion,
and not worthy of the effort. From gates far apart the watch-
dogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up an
antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the
evenings, and it is in their custody (when the public gardens
of Combray were constructed on its site) that the Boulevard
de la Gare must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as
soon as they begin their alternate challenge and acceptance,
I can see it again with all its lime-trees, and its pavement
glistening beneath the moon.
Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask
my mother—‘Where are we?’ Utterly worn out by the walk
but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess
that she had not the least idea. He would shrug his shoul-
ders and laugh. And then, as though it had slipped, with his
latchkey, from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to
us, when it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own
garden, which had come hand-in-hand with the familiar
corner of the Rue du Saint-Esprit, to await us, to greet us at
the end of our wanderings over paths unknown. My moth-

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