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herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by
contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered
less ‘righteous.’ One could see that the ideas which the me-
diaeval artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived
to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classi-
cal and of early Christian history, ideas whose inaccuracy
was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not
from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct,
unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. An-
other Combray person whom I could discern also, potential
and typified, in the gothic sculptures of Saint-André-des-
Champs was young Théodore, the assistant in Camus’s
shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was well aware that
she had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when
my aunt was too ill for Françoise to be able, unaided, to lift
her in her bed or to carry her to her chair, rather than let
the kitchen-maid come upstairs and, perhaps, ‘make an im-
pression’ on my aunt, she would send out for Théodore. And
this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town as
a ‘bad character,’ was so abounding in that spirit which had
served to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs,
and particularly in the feelings of respect due, in Franchise’s
eyes, to all ‘poor invalids,’ and, above all, to her own ‘poor
mistress,’ that he had, when he bent down to raise my aunt’s
head from her pillow, the same air of préraphaélite simplic-
ity and zeal which the little angels in the has-reliefs wear,
who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed
of Our Lady, as though those carved faces of stone, naked
and grey like trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only,

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