Though I dared not look at them
save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme was composed
of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the
shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy
buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public
rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had
opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly,
like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as
gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in
following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside
myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and
thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her
contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.
M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us. He
belonged to a good family, and had once been music-master to my
grandmother's sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and inheriting
some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of Combray, we used
often to invite him to our house.
Pages:
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216