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By Root 1185 0

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 it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised like a village in the Old Testament by all the slings and arrows of the storm, which beat down obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already received the forgiveness of the Almighty, who had restored to it the light of his sun, which fell upon it in frayed, golden shafts, unequal in length like the rays of a monstrance.

Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there in the distance, in a landscape which in the failing light and saturated atmosphere resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of a hill plunged in watery darkness shone out like little boats which have folded their sails and ride at anchor all night upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper on the part of the permanent, underlying fine weather which, in sharp contrast to the fluid and unstable fine weather of winter, having firmly established itself in the soil where it has materialised in dense masses of foliage on which the rain may drip without weakening the endurance of their deep-seated happiness, has hoisted for the entire season, in the very streets of the village, on the walls of its houses and its gardens, its silken banners, violet and white. Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner with a book, I could hear the water dripping from our chestnut-trees, but I knew that the shower would merely burnish their leaves, and that they promised to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the rainy night, ensuring the continuance of the fine weather; I knew that however much it rained, tomorrow, over the white fence of Tansonville, the little heart-shaped leaves would ripple, as numerous as ever; and it was without the least distress that I watched the poplar in the Rue des Per champs praying for mercy, bowing in desperation before the storm; without the least distress that I heard, at the bottom of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among the lilacs.

If the weather was bad all morning, my parents would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie’s estate; for she had died at last, vindicating at one and the same time those who had insisted that her debilitating regimen would ultimately kill her and those who had always maintained that she suffered from a disease that was not imaginary but organic, by the visible proof of which the sceptics would be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it; causing by her death no great grief save to one person alone, but to that one a grief that was savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my aunt’s last illness Françoise never left her for an instant, never undressed, allowed no one else to do anything for her, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then at last we understood that the sort of terror in which