Page 256 - swanns-way

Guermantes way.’ And off we would set, immediately after
luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us
into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp an-
gle, dotted with grass-plots over which two or three wasps
would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its
name, from which its odd characteristics and its personali-
ty were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search in
vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school
now rises upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like
those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying
that they can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-loft and
an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Norman choir, re-
store the whole church to the state in which it probably was
in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern ed-
ifice standing, I pierce through it and ‘restore’ the Rue des
Perchamps. And for such reconstruction memory furnish-
es me with more detailed guidance than is generally at the
disposal of restorers; the pictures which it has preserved—
perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon to
follow the rest into oblivion—of what Combray looked like
in my childhood’s days; pictures which, simply because it
was the old Combray that traced their outlines upon my
mind before it vanished, are as moving—if I may compare
a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproduc-
tions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing
on me—as those old engravings of the ‘Cenacolo,’ or that
painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in
which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo
and the portico of Saint Mark’s.

256 Swann’s Way