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I am sure that in a book and to that extent my feelings were closely akin to those of Francoise such a conception of mourning, in the manner of the Chanson de Roland and of the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, would have seemed most attractive.
In vain I called upon it now. In vain I compressed 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 alone as far as the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs: never did I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation.
On my right I could see across the cornfields the two crocketed, rustic spires of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, plated, honeycombed, yellowed, and roughened as two ears of wheat.
And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town as a 'bad character, was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, and particularly in the feelings of respect due, in Franchise's eyes, to all 'poor invalids, and, above all, to her own 'poor mistress, that he had, when he bent down to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of preraphaelite simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the has-reliefs wear, who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed of Our Lady, as though those carved faces of stone, naked and grey like trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of Theodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
Another Combray person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic sculptures of Saint-Andre-des-Champs was young Theodore, the assistant in Camus's shop.
Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, How typically French that church was! Over its door the saints, the kings of chivalry with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals were carved as they might have been in the mind of Francoise.
The 'Meseglise way' with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields as Saint-Andre-des-Champs lay hidden an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart.
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