Urban

And I knew that they bore not only the title of Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes

And I knew that they bore not only the title of Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied themselves to them by marriage and so become Counts of Combray, the first citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones who did not reside in it—Comtes de Combray, possessing Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it in their personalities, and imbued, no doubt, with that strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling, presumably, outside, in the street, between heaven and earth, like that Gilbert de Guermantes of whom I could see, in the stained glass of the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the reverse side in dull black lacquer, if I raised my eyes to look for him on my way to Camus's for a packet of salt.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Guermantes way; seeing their ancestors in the church
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Window, Église St.-Jacques, Illiers-Combray || Source - Jeff Drouin, 7 July 2004
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I knew that it was the residence of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes

I knew that it was the residence of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages that did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I thought of them either in tapestry, like the Comtesse de Guermantes in the "Coronation of Esther" which hung in our church, or else in iridescent colours, like Gilbert the Bad in the stained-glass window where he changed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling–in short, invariably wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age and bathed, as in a sunset, in the amber light which glowed from the resounding syllable "antes."

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Guermantes way, imagining them
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Chapel of Église St.-Jacques, Illiers-Combray || Source - Jeff Drouin, 7 July 2004
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Before starting homewards

Before starting homewards we would sit there for a long time, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass over which came to us, faint, horizontal, but dense and metallic still, echoes of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had not melted into the air they had traversed for so long, and, ribbed by the successive palpitation of all their sound-waves, throbbed as they grazed the flowers at our feet.

Narrative Context: 
Picnic on the Guermantes way
Image: 
Église St.-Jacques, Illiers-Combray, by Dominique Ferré || Source - http://perso.wanadoo.fr/illiers-combray/
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We would come at length to the Mall

We would come at length to the Mall, among whose tree-tops 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 blissful 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.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Guermantes way
Image: 
Église St.-Jacques, Illiers-Combray, by Dominique Ferré || Source - http://perso.wanadoo.fr/illiers-combray/
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But in my dreams of Combray

But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-screen and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Romanesque choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it must have been in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing, but pierce through it and "restore" the Rue des Perchamps. And for such 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 today, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion—of what Combray looked like in my childhood days; pictures which, 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 Last Supper 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.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Guermantes way
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St. Mark's portico, Venice || Source - N/A
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Alas, it was in vain that I implored the castle-keep of Roussainville

     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.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Méséglise way alone
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Chartres statues, West porch, central portal, left jamb || Source - Jeff Drouin, 6 July 2004
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I found an additional merit in everything that was in my mind at the moment

I found an additional merit in everything that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled roof, the grass growing out of the wall, the village of Roussainville into which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steeple of its church, as a result of this fresh emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, mysterious and propitious breeze.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Méséglise way alone
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There, too, not affixed to the stone like the little angels

     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.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Méséglise way
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Often, too, we would hurry to take shelter

     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.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Méséglise way
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Chartres West porch, right portal || Source - Jeff Drouin, 6 July 2004
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On my right I could see across the cornfields

On my right I could see across the cornfields the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat.

Narrative Context: 
Walking the Méséglise Way
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Chartres façade || Source - Jeff Drouin, 6 July 2004
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