Swann's Way

atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact,
nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this
view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But
since into none of these little etchings, whatever the taste my
memory may have been able to bring to their execution, was it able to
contribute an element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not
merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature
without parallel, so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole
section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the
steeple of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw
it at five o'clock when going to call for letters at the post-office,
some doors away from one, on the left, raising abruptly with its
isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or again, when one had to go in
and ask for news of Mme. Sazerat, one's eyes followed the line where it
ran low again beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing
further afield one went to the station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in