ll of them
were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity
sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare
brilliance the very cords of their lovely tapestry of glass. There
was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little
rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience
of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a
ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision
had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled
by turns, a rare and transient fire--the next instant it had taken on
all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a
flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of
the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were
along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was
following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped
in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the
deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on
some enormous breastplate; but beyond which could be distinguished,
dearer than all such treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which
could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in
which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the
straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came
down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness
of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime
in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded
carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.

Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in
which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the
features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of
Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one
another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch
of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the
yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have
acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding
atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in Silk
and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the
top, separated in