Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop to
look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two and two, one pair above
another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing to which
not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released, it let
fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little while
would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed them to
sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden
uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had
struck them and driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the
violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return and
be absorbed in the tower, deadly no longer but benignant, some perching
here and there (not seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and swallowing
some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull perches, with
an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave. Without quite knowing why,
my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of
vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her love--and deem rich in
beneficent influences--nature itself, when the hand of man had not, as did
my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and the works of genius.
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