ing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire
that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her
love--and deem rich in beneficent influences--nature itself, when the
hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and
the works of genius. And certainly every part one saw of the church
served to distinguish the whole from any other building by a kind of
general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in the steeple that
the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its
individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple which spoke for
the church. I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found in
the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the
world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of
architecture, she would say:

"My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful,
but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it
could play the piano, I am sure it would really _play_." And when she
gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent
inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like
hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the
outpouring of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it;
her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old
stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost
pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight
and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly
far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks
into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.

It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which shaped and crowned and
consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every point of view
in the town. From my bedroom window I could discern no more than its
base, which had been freshly covered with slates; but when on Sundays I
saw these, in the hot light of a summer morning, blaze like a black sun
I would say to myself: "Good heavens! nine o'clock! I must get ready for
mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Leonie first,"
and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the
Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade behind
the blinds of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way
to ma