When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before the
altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of
almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed
that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in
which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste of
an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mile.
Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless
silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the
murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quivering
like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded
by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept
the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now
transmuted into flowers.
Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M. Vinteuil,
in the porch. Boys would be chevying one another in the Square, and he
would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the big.
If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she had
been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and more
sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless,
schoolboyish utterance, which had, perhaps, made us think that she was
angling for an invitation to the house.
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