ch reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance
than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it
has preserved--perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon
to follow the rest into oblivion--of what Combray looked like in my
childhood's days; pictures which, simply because it was the old Combray
that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as
moving--if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works,
reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me--as
those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile
Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist,
the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's.

We would pass, in the Rue de l'Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the
Oiseau Flesche, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would
rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes,
and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some
litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would
come at length to the Mall, among whose treetops I could distinguish the
steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down
and spend the whole day there, reading and listening to the bells, for
it was so charming there and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you
would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that
it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the
indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do,
had simply, in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops
which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed,
at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.

The great charm of the 'Guermantes' way was that we had beside us,
almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten
minutes after leaving the house, by a foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux.
And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter morning, after the
sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the
disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous
preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they
have not contrived to banish seem more sordid than ever) the river
flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its
only companions a c