Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in which
tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the
features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of
Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one
another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch
of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the
yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have
acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding
atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in Silk
and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the
top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing
upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong
rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these, the
treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were
almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said,
by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis
the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to
go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as
into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a
rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people's
supernatural passage--all these things made of the church for me something
entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied,
so to speak, four dimensions of space--the name of the fourth being
Time--which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after
bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across 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, Theodore 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 bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which,
on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own
accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is
to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had
buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way.
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