And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a
porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which
until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet,
stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become
flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment
all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies
on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings
and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and
gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
COMBRAY
Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its
long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a
shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses,
which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an
outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive
painting.
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