Page 94 - swanns-way

of a little street in some country town, I came upon three
alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall,
rubbed, worn, crumbling, and unusually high; with win-
dows pierced in it far overhead and the same asymmetrical
appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that moment I
did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at
Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been
expressed in its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed
‘The Church!’
The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the
Rue Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by
its two neighbours, Mme. Loiseau’s house and the phar-
macy of M. Rapin, against which its walls rested without
interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might have
had her number in the street had the streets of Combray
borne numbers, and at whose door one felt that the post-
man ought to stop on his morning rounds, before going into
Mme. Loiseau’s and after leaving M. Rapin’s, there existed,
for all that, between the church and everything in Combray
that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which
I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind. In
vain might Mme. Loiseau deck her window-sills with fuch-
sias, which developed the bad habit of letting their branches
trail at all times and in all directions, head downwards, and
whose flowers had no more important business, when they
were big enough to taste the joys of life, than to go and cool
their purple, congested cheeks against the dark front of the
church; to me such conduct sanctified the fuchsias not at
all; between the flowers and the blackened stones towards

94 Swann’s Way