broken nor the light extinguished had buried
itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."

And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that? It was so
coarse, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the religious spirit. From
outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower
level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced
ashlar, jagged with flints, in all of which there was nothing
particularly ecclesiastical; the windows seemed to have been pierced at
an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall
rather than of a church. And certainly in later years, were I to recall
all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never enter my mind to
compare with any one of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day,
turning out 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 windows 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 pharmacy 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 postman 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 fuchsias, 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 which they
le