be chevying one another in the Square, and he
would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the
big. If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she
had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and
more sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless,
schoolboyish utterance, which had, perhaps, made us think that she was
angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange
a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart
which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain.
As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and
stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, then,
instead of taking us home at once, my father, in his thirst for personal
distinction, would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my
mother's utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing
which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his
strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, which
began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and
to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of
civilisation, because every year, as we came down from Paris, we would
be warned to take special care, when we got to Combray, not to miss
the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would start
again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct, out of the lands of
Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest limit.
We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most
attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight,
copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases
of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its
beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was
a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which
endures for all time. I would by now be dragging my weary limbs, and
ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees seemed a
consolation which I could obtain only at the price of great suffering
and exhaustion, and not worthy of the effort. From gates far apart
the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up
an antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the
evenings, and it is in their custod