COMBRAY


Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its
long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a
shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses,
which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an
outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive
painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing, like its streets,
whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with
outside steps, capped with gables which projected long shadows downwards,
were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down, to draw
back the curtains in the sitting-room windows; streets with the solemn
names of Saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the early
lords of Combray, such as the Rue Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in
which my aunt's house stood, the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her
railings, and the Rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate
opened; and these Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my
memory, painted in colours so different from those in which the world is
decked for me to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church
which towered above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial
than the projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be
able to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de
l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche, from whose windows in