lump of daffodils, come out before their time, a few
primroses, the first in flower, while here and there burned the blue
flame of a violet, its stem bent beneath the weight of the drop of
perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which,
at this point, would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a
hazel, under which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken
root. At Combray, where I knew everyone, and could always detect the
blacksmith or grocer's boy through his disguise of a beadle's uniform
or chorister's surplice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was
never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to
raise his hat when we passed; and then I would always be just on the
point of asking his name, when some one would make a sign to me to be
quiet, or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path which
ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The
ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad
meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station.
Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of
the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages,
had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence
against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville.
Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad
surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in
their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out
over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt,
fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked;
but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and
commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there
in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past
that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by
the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong
food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the
little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different,
seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible
features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.
For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had
chosen for their games amon