Swann's Way

house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our
visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along
her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner
curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay
with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers,
illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting,
shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees. But on some
days, though very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have
shed its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into
the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning
along the line of window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would
have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an
opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
and broadened by every ripple upon the water's surface, would be lying
across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would
make out a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me: