Page 96 - swanns-way

only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released,
it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for
a little while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient
stones which allowed them to sport thus and never seemed
to see them, becoming of a sudden uninhabitable and dis-
charging some infinitely disturbing element, had struck
them and driven them forth. Then after patterning every-
where the violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed,
they would return and be absorbed in the tower, deadly no
longer but benignant, some perching here and there (not
seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and swallowing
some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull
perches, with an angler’s immobility, on the crest of a wave.
Without quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the
steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, preten-
sion, and meanness which made her love—and deem rich in
beneficent influences—nature itself, when the hand of man
had not, as did my great-aunt’s gardener, trimmed it, and
the works of genius. And certainly every part one saw of
the church served to distinguish the whole from any other
building by a kind of general feeling which pervaded it, but
it was in the steeple that the church seemed to display a con-
sciousness of itself, to affirm its individual and responsible
existence. It was the steeple which spoke for the church. I
think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found
in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything
else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinc-
tion. Ignorant of architecture, she would say:
‘My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not convention-

96 Swann’s Way