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who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange them-
selves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and
ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the
Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis,
and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its
crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the
shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat’s wing
of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with
a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a
deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it
was said, ‘by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the
Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord,
the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse
is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light
extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which
it had gently forced its way.’
And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that?
It was so coarse, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the re-
ligious spirit. From outside, since the street crossing which
it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall was thrust
upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with
flints, in all of which there was nothing particularly eccle-
siastical; the windows seemed to have been pierced at an
abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a
prison wall rather than of a church. And certainly in later
years, were I to recall all the glorious apses that I had seen,
it would never enter my mind to compare with any one
of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day, turning out

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