Page 257 - swanns-way

We would pass, in the Rue de l’Oiseau, before the old hos-
telry of the Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once
upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de
Montpensier, de Guermantes, and de Montmorency, when
they had to come down to Combray for some litigation with
their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would
come at length to the Mall, among whose treetops I could
distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have
liked to be able to sit down and spend the whole day there,
reading and listening to the bells, for it was so charming
there and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you would
have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but
that it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple,
with the indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who
has nothing else to do, had simply, in order to squeeze out
and let fall the few golden drops which had slowly and nat-
urally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed, at a given
moment, the distended surface of the silence.
The great charm of the ‘Guermantes’ way was that we had
beside us, almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne.
We crossed it first, ten minutes after leaving the house, by a
foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux. And every year, when we
arrived at Combray, on Easter morning, after the sermon,
if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all
the disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festi-
val, the gorgeous preparations for which make the everyday
household utensils that they have not contrived to banish
seem more sordid than ever) the river flowing past, sky-blue
already between banks still black and bare, its only com-

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