Swann's Way

and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant,
hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness
of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where,
near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful
gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up
sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves
smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger
brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked
down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting
down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault,
ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his
sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little
daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been