o
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 pebbles 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 window 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 solution 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 feeling which makes us not
merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature
without parallel, so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole
section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the
steeple of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw
it at five o'clock when going to call for letters at the post-office,
some doors away from one, on the left, raising abruptly with its
isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or again, when one had to go in
and ask for news of Mme. Sazerat, one's eyes followed the line where it
ran low again beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing
further afield one went to the station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in
profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some
unknown point in its revolution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the
apse, drawn muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed
to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to hurl its
spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was always to the steeple that
one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up
the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger
of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of
human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with
them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter