SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 261should be there or not, nor whether they deserve the sou-be sure
only whether you yourself deserve to have it to give; and give it
prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers'). The beggars were
so ancient, he decided, that they might well be the same Ruskin
saw nineteen years before. The master himself seemed to stand
beside him and guide his hand; he remembered Frederic Moreau,
in L' Education sentimentale, tipping the harp-player on the Seine
steamer after his first sight ofMme Arnoux, and Flaubert's words:
'it was no mere vanity that urged him to this act of charity, but a
feeling of benediction, an almost religious impulse of the heart,
in which he associated his companion'.
It was noon: 'the sun was paying his daily call on the Gilded
Virgin, nowadays gilded by him alone; and it was to his passing
caress that she seemed to address her age-old smile'. He stepped
back; the sunshine on the rows of saints gave to one a halo round
his forehead, to another a cloak of warm light about his shoulders.
Over the transept the slender, immensely tall, slightly leaning
spire seemed, as Ruskin suggested, to 'bend to the west wind'.
The Virgin was surrounded by flowering sprays of stone haw-
thorn-like those in the petit sender at Illiers in the Month of
Maty-'from whose endless spring the wind of time seemed
already to have blown a few petals'. She carried a live jackdaw in
the crook of her hand; she smiled, he thought, remembering the
ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, like a celestial hostess in
her doorway; and as he watched, a few boatmen, hurrying past to
meet the high tide on the Somme, raised their eyes to her as the
Star of the Sea. He entered the cathedral and wandered among the
carved stalls of the choir-'there is nothing else so beautiful cut
out of the goodly trees of the world,' wrote Ruskin. Proust had
seen casts of them in Paris, which he was not allowed to touch,
in the museum at the Trocadero (where the Narrator saw replicas
of the Virgin and Apostles of Balbec^1 ); but now, by permission
. of the verger, he was allowed to tap the long harp-strings of the
grain of the wood itself, which gave out 'i\ sound as of a musical
instrument, that seemed to tell how tenuous they were and how
indestructible'. He proceeded to the sculptures of the west front,
which Ruskin called the Bible of Amiens. Of these he has little
to say that is not in Ruskin; but he borrowed for the arms and
motto of the Baron de Charlus^2 the figure of Christ trampling on
1 I, 659 • III, 80!