story,
ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were
derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct,
unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray
person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic
sculptures of Saint-Andre-des-Champs was young Theodore, the assistant
in Camus's shop. And, indeed, Francoise herself was well aware that she
had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill
for Francoise to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry
her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs
and, perhaps, 'make an impression' on my aunt, she would send out for
Theodore. And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town
as a 'bad character,' was so abounding in that spirit which had served
to decorate the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, and particularly in the
feelings of respect due, in Franchise's eyes, to all 'poor invalids,'
and, above all, to her own 'poor mistress,' that he had, when he
bent down to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of
preraphaelite simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the
has-reliefs wear, who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the
deathbed of Our Lady, as though those carved faces of stone, naked and
grey like trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only, storing up life
and waiting to flower again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and
cunning as the face of Theodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance
of ripe apples.

There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels, but
detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her
pedestal as upon a footstool, which had been placed there to save her
feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full
cheeks, the firm breasts which swelled out inside her draperies like
a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and
stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous
expression of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which
imparted to the statue itself a kindliness that I had not looked to
find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from
the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose
presence there--as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up
beside leaves carved in stone--seemed intended by fate to allow us, by
co