SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN :.65about cathedrals, it was in order to visit the cathedrals for what
they could tell him about Ruskin.
On the very day of Ruskin's death Proust happened to re-read
in The Seven Lamps of Architecture the description of a little
grotesque figure, 'vexed and puzzled in his malice; his hand is
pressed hard against his cheek-bone, and the flesh of the cheek
is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure'.1 'I was seized by the
desire to see the little man of whom Ruskin speaks,' he wrote,
'and I went to Rouen as if in obedience to a testamentary request,
as if he had bequeathed to the care of his readers the insignificant
creature whom he had, by speaking of him, restored to life.'
Proust and his friends looked up at the west front. Row upon
row of saints warmed themselves in the sunlight of the winter
morning, soaring to seemingly uninhabited heights, where, never-
meless, a carved hermit lived in eternal isolation, or a St
Christopher glanced back for ever, wry-necked, at me Christ-
Child his burden. How, in mis thronged city of stone, could they
find one tiny mannikin? They walked, wim little hope, to his
abode in the norm porch, the Portail des Libraires, where me
mediaeval booksellers had once kept their stalls; and suddenly
Yeatman's young wife-who luckily was a trained and talented
sculptor--cried: "There's one that looks just like him!" It was
me little stone man, not six inches in height, and crumbled by
time, but keeping still his angry wrinkled cheek and me minute
speck of malice in his eye. Like the surging naked souls in me
Last Judgement above him, he seemed resurrected, and Ruskin
with him. The party moved to Saint-Madou near by, where mere
was anomer Last Judgement, wim roaring flames pursuing souls
whose anger and despair had reminded Ruskin of Orcagna and
Hogarm; and to Saint-Ouen, where they talked to the verger
Julien Edouard who had guided Ruskin in 1880 and Marie
Nordlinger in 1898. "Monsieur Ruskin said our church was me
finest gothic monument in me world," he told them, much to
Proust's bewildered amusement. Armed as he was wim The
Seven Lamps of Architecture, he knew Ruskin had written
peevishly of me lantern in me tower: 'it is one of the basest pieces
of gomic in Europe ... resembling, and deserving little more
credit man, the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery';
and he had called the shafts supporting the piers of the nave 'tlle
1 Library Editiun, vol. 8, 1I7