Porch

     Alas, it was in vain that I implored the castle-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant of my earliest desires when, at the top of our house in Combray, in the little room that smelt of orris-root, I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which for all I knew was deadly—until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of the flowering currant that drooped around me. In vain did I call upon it now. In vain did I compress the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I might go as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did I find there the peasant-girl whom I should not have failed to meet had I been with my grandfather and thus unable to engage her in conversation.

     There, too, not affixed to the stone like the little angels, but detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her pedestal as upon a footstool that had been placed there to save her feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts swelling out her draperies like clusters of ripe grapes inside a sack, the narrow forehead, short and impudent nose, deep-set eyes, and hardy, stolid, fearless demeanour of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which imparted to the statue 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—like the leaves of a climbing plant that have grown up beside some sculpted foliage—seemed deliberately intended to enable us, by confronting us with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art.

     Often, too, we would hurry to take shelter, huddled together cheek by jowl with its stony saints and patriarchs, under the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs. How French that church was! Over its door the saints, the chevalier kings with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals were carved as they might have been in the mind of Françoise. The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less “righteous.” One could see the notions which the mediaeval artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions 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, distorted, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray personality whom I could discern also, potential and presaged, in the Gothic sculptures of Saint-André-des-Champs was young Théodore, the assistant in Camus’s shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was so well aware that she had in him a countryman and contemporary that when my aunt was too ill for Françoise 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, get into my aunt’s good books, she would send for Théodore. And this lad, who was rightly regarded as a scapegrace, was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, and particularly in the feelings of respect due, in Françoise’s eyes, to all “poor invalids,” and above all to her own “poor mistress,” that when he bent down to raise my aunt’s head from her pillow, he wore the same naïve and zealous mien as the little angels in the bas-reliefs who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the swooning Virgin, as though those carved stone faces, naked and grey as trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower again in the countless plebeian faces, reverent and cunning as the face of Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.

     On leaving the church we would stay chatting for a moment with M. Vinteuil in front of the porch. Boys would be chasing one another in the Square, and he would intervene, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the big. If his daughter said in her gruff voice how glad she had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though a more sensitive sister within her had blushed at this thoughtless, schoolboyish utterance which might have made us think that she was angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain. As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, my father, in his thirst for glory, instead of taking us home at once would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my mother’s utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his strategic genius.

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.

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.