Percepied, who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and
recognised us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him, I received an
impression of this sort which I did not abandon without having first
subjected it to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set on
the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind because the
Doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at
Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose door he asked us
to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that
special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught
sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was
playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road
seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a
third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a
hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance,
appeared none the less to be standing by their side.
In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes of
aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not
penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay
behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once
to contain and to conceal.
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