t had
been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to
night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took
when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling
a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they
become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable,
so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park,
and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and
their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

COMBRAY

Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about
its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as
a shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking
houses, which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and
there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town
in a primitive painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing,
like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the
country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected
long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun
began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows;
streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured
in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue
Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood,
the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these
Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in
colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me
to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered
above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubsta