Page 278 - swanns-way

to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set on
the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind
because the Doctor had still, before returning to Combray,
to call at Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at
whose door he asked us to wait for him. At a bend in the
road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which
bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught sight of the
twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was
playing, while the movement of the carriage and the wind-
ings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing
their position; and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq,
which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley,
and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, ap-
peared none the less to be standing by their side.
In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the
changes of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt
that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impres-
sion, that something more lay behind that mobility, that
luminosity, something which they seemed at once to con-
tain and to conceal.
The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves
seemed to come so little nearer them, that I was astonished
when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church
of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure
which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and the
business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed
to me irksome; I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain
those converging lines, moving in the sunshine, and, for the
time being, to think of them no more. And it is probable

278 Swann’s Way