Page 601 - swanns-way

to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman Cathedral, which
its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with
a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in
the silence of its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the
coach; Questambert, Pontorson, ridiculously silly and sim-
ple, white feathers and yellow beaks strewn along the road
to those well-watered and poetic spots; Benodet, a name
scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the river
down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy,
rosy flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously
reflected in the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more
firmly attached, this, and since the Middle Ages, among the
rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon
a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cob-
webs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt
points of tarnished silver?
These images were false for another reason also; namely,
that they were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the
object to which my imagination aspired, which my senses
took in but incompletely and without any immediate plea-
sure, I had committed to the safe custody of names; doubtless
because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those
names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves
are not very comprehensive; the most that I could do was to
include in each of them two or three of the principal curi-
osities of the town, which would lie there side by side,
without interval or partition; in the name of Balbec, as in
the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one
buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging

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