Swann's Way

crumbling, and unusually high; with windows pierced in it far overhead
and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that
moment I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at
Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been expressed in
its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed "The Church!"

The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the Rue
Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by its two neighbours,
Mme. Loiseau's house and the pharmacy of M. Rapin, against which its
walls rested without interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might
have had her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne
numbers, and at whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on
his morning rounds, before going into Mme. Loiseau's and after leaving
M. Rapin's, there existed, for all that, between the church and
everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of
demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind.
In vain might Mme. Loiseau deck her window-sills with fuchsias, which
developed the bad habit of letting their branches trail at all times
and in all directions, head downwards, and whose flowers had no more