Page 90 - swanns-way

ments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow
and more luxurious with the sun shewing off all its rich
furnishings, seemed to have almost a habitable air, like the
hall—all sculptured stone and painted glass—of some me-
diaeval mansion), you might see Mme. Sazerat kneel for an
instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly
corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the
baker’s and was taking home for her luncheon. In another,
a mountain of rosy snow, at whose foot a battle was being
fought, seemed to have frozen the window also, which it
swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like a pane to
which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illu-
mined by a sunrise—the same, doubtless, which purpled
the reredos of the altar with tints so fresh that they seemed
rather to be thrown on it for a moment by a light shining
from outside and shortly to be extinguished than painted
and permanently fastened on the stone. And all of them
were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery
antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing
in its threadbare brilliance the very cords of their lovely tap-
estry of glass. There was one among them which was a tall
panel composed of a hundred little rectangular windows,
of blue principally, like a great game of patience of the kind
planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a
ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own
shifting vision had drawn across the window, whose colours
died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and transient
fire—the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of
a peacock’s tail, then shook and wavered in a flaming and

90 Swann’s Way