Page 205 - swanns-way

and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split
and scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon
and inlay with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her
chest-of-drawers, illuminating the room in their passage
with the same delicate, slanting, shadowed beams that fall
among the boles of forest trees. But on some days, though
very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have shed
its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we
turned into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from
the western sky burning along the line of window-panes;
the pond beneath the Calvary would have lost its fiery glow,
sometimes indeed had changed already to an opalescent
pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
and broadened by every ripple upon the water’s surface,
would be lying across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew
near the house, we would make out a figure standing upon
the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me: ‘Good heav-
ens! There is Françoise looking out for us; your aunt must
be anxious; that means we are late.’
And without wasting time by stopping to take off our
‘things’ we would fly upstairs to my aunt Léonie’s room to
reassure her, to prove to her by our bodily presence that all
her gloomy imaginings were false, that, on the contrary,
nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the
‘Guermantes way,’ and, good lord, when one took that walk,
my aunt knew well enough that one could never say at what
time one would be home.
‘There, Françoise,’ my aunt would say, ‘didn’t I tell you
that they must have gone the Guermantes way? Good gra-

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