Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might
watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction, they veered
in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a
little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set
meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming
no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of
fields. They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned
in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; and while we drew
away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way,
and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes,
drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing
more, now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming
and resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
- - -
I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my corner
of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit of placing,
in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville market, I had
finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had
so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the
mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had
just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.
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