Porch

Henceforth, more often than not when I thought of her, I would see her standing before the porch of a cathedral, explaining to me what each of the statues meant, and with a smile which was my highest commendation, presenting me as her friend to Bergotte. And invariably the charm of all the fancies which the thought of cathedrals used to inspire in me, the charm of the hills and valleys of the Ile-de-France and of the plains of Normandy, would be reflected in the picture I had formed in my mind's eye of Mlle Swann; nothing more remained but to know and to love her.

Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until then remained hidden from me, of pine-forests or of hail-storms, of Notre-Dame Cathedral, of Athalie or of Phèdre, by some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode into my consciousness.

But the interruption and the commentary which a visit from Swann once occasioned in the course of my reading, which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, Bergotte, resulted in the consequence that for a long time afterwards it was against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but against a wholly different background, the porch of a Gothic cathedral, that I saw the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.

For even if I had bought it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's–whose grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to shop there, as she did at Camus's, but was better stocked as a stationer and bookseller–tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly serials and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, it was because I had recognized it as a book which had been well spoken of by the school-master or the school-friend who at that particular time seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of truth and beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.

How I loved our church, and how clearly I can see it still! The old porch by which we entered, black, and full of holes as a colander, was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides (as also was the font to which it led us) just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress itself on the stone, to carve grooves in it like those made by cart-wheels upon stone gate-posts which they bump against every day.