MARCEL PROUST
the Rue des Vierges with lawns, gravel paths, dwarf palms,
geranium-beds and an ornamental water, not a lake as in Swann's
park, but a broadening, still hardly too wide for leaping, of a
brook running into the Loir. This winding pond, now almost
silted up, had a rustic bridge, water-lilies, swans and carp, so
many that the children were allowed to fish for them-hence the
fishing-line with its bobbing cork which the Narrator sees in the
water by Gilberte1-and its banks were bordered with forget-
me-nots and the blue and yellow irises whose roots scented the
room at the top of the bouse. Along the paths were curious,
turreted dove-cotes of variegated brick, modelled on the Arab
pigeon-houses which Uncle Jules had seen in Algeria. Somewhere
in this region Marcel and Robert planted a poplar sapling, for
which Robert searched in vain more than fifty years later, among
the other trees near the great catalpa, a fortnight before his death
in 1935. The spire of Saint-Jacques, nearly half a mile away, shows
through the trees, as it did at Tansonville.^2 There is a sound of
gently falling water from a weir in the Loir near by.
Above the lawns was a steep hill covered with a dense copse of
hazels, known as the Bois Pilou, where Marcel and Robert played
at hide-and-seek, and sometimes frightened themselves into
believing they were really lost. Near the left-hand side of the
garden, separated by the hawthorn hedge from the petit sentier, a
path with stone steps climbed the slope, a favourite haunt, nowa-
days at least, of long, fat, steel-grey slow-worms. Half-way up
Uncle Jules had built an octagonal summer-house in red brick,
the Maison des Archers. Its foundations were an artificial grottO,
and the first floor was a furnished rest-room where Marcel could
lie reading Le Capitaine Fracasse on a pink divan. Still further up
the slope was a concrete tank which supplied water for the hose-
pipes and fountains below. It was filled by a pump worked by
horses, who every few days would plod round a circular track,
one at each end of a rotating beam with the pump in the middle.
When the horses were not working, only the shadow of the beam
would turn with the sun: "You see, it's a kind of sundial," Uncle
J utes told Marcel. At the bottom of the tank, when the water was
low, Marcel could see a dim entanglement of pipes, green with
water-weeds; a newt slept clinging to the sides, until he startled
it and it leapt into the water. From the path by the tank, over the
1 I, '37 • III,698