e cloaks of peasant-women
going into the church, and of their fingers dipping into the water, had
managed by agelong repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress
itself on the stone, to carve ruts in it like those made by cart-wheels
upon stone gate-posts against which they are driven every day. Its
memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray,
who were buried there, furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual
pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time
had softened and sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey
and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky,
frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning
the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their
limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription,
bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed
characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest
were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant
as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside
you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was
filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a
playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between
earth and heaven; and in the blue light of its slanting shadow, on
weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those
rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more
luxurious with the sun shewing off all its rich furnishings, seemed to
have almost a habitable air, like the hall--all sculptured stone and
painted glass--of some mediaeval mansion), you might see Mme. Sazerat
kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly
corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker's
and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a mountain of rosy
snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen the
window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like
a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illumined
by a sunrise--the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of the
altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for
a moment by a light shining from outside and shortly to be extinguished
than painted and permanently fastened on the stone. And a