Page 234 - swanns-way

storing up life and waiting to flower again in countless ple-
beian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of Théodore,
and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels,
but detached from the porch, of more than human stat-
ure, erect upon her pedestal as upon a footstool, which had
been placed there to save her feet from contact with the wet
ground, stood a saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts
which swelled out inside her draperies like a cluster of ripe
grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and stubborn
nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous
expression of the country-women of those parts. This simi-
larity, which imparted to the statue itself a kindliness that
I had not looked to find in it, was corroborated often by the
arrival of some girl from the fields, come, like ourselves, for
shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there—as when
the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up beside leaves
carved in stone—seemed intended by fate to allow us, by
confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical es-
timate of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in
the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Roussainville,
within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville was
now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised,
like a village in the Old Testament, by all the innumerable
spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down obliquely
upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already re-
ceived the forgiveness of the Almighty, Who had restored to
it the light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of uneven
length, like the rays of a monstrance upon an altar.

234 Swann’s Way