Page 99 - swanns-way

and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared
thus without the church. And, indeed, there are many oth-
ers which look best when seen in this way, and I can call
to mind vignettes of housetops with surmounting steeples
in quite another category of art than those formed by the
dreary streets of Combray. I shall never forget, in a quaint
Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eigh-
teenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many
reasons, between which, when one looks up at them from
a fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the
gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars
into the sky with the effect of crowning and completing
their fronts, but in a material so different, so precious, so
beringed, so rosy, so polished, that it is at once seen to be no
more a part of them than would be a part of two pretty peb-
bles lying side by side, between which it had been washed
on the beach, the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell
spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour. Even in
Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a win-
dow from which one can see across a first, a second, and
even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a
violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest
‘prints’ which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solu-
tion of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome
of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris
the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But
since into none of these little etchings, whatever the taste
my memory may have been able to bring to their execution,
was it able to contribute an element I have long lost, the feel-

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