Marcel Proust: A Biography

(^28) MARCEL PROUST
bird tied to a pole, leads to the right towards the Rue du Saint-
Esprit.^1 But the parents and the blissfully weary children would
press forward along the Rue du Chemin de Fer into the Avenue
de la Gare. As they looked back, the cross was silhouetted against
the water of the Loir near the Gue Bellerin, lit crimson by the
western sky, but in the Avenue de la Gare, which contains, as at
Combray, 'the most attractive villas in the town', the moon was
already shining. In every garden (for this is almost the only street
at Illiers where the houses have front gardens) 'the moonlight, as
in the paintings of Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases
of white marble, its fountains, its iron gates left half-open'.
Marcel was dragging his feet and dropping with sleep, and 'the
scent of the lime-trees seemed like a reward which could only be
won at the expense of great fatigue, and wasn't worth the effort'.
At last Dr Proust would stop and say: "Where are we now?" No
one knew; but the kind, bearded father would point with a laugh
to their back-garden gate in the Place Lemoine, and Mme Proust,
whose respect for her husband reached its peak when she
considered his interest in meteorology or his sense of direction,
would murmur: "My dear, you are amazing!"
1 The Rue de l'Oiseau and its inn are among the Narrator·s most
persistent memories of Combray. Cf. I, 48, !S, .66; II, 53'; III, 624, 8S6, 9S!