SAINT-LOUP 303appear the sculptured heads of eight colossal oxen, carved in
memory of the beasts who dragged the stones for the building-
surely the strangest and most Proustian feature in all the
cathedrals of France; and Emmanuel ingeniously arranged that
his friends should have their first glimpse of the oxen when he
led them suddenly round a street corner. The Narrator compares
the proud race of the Guermantes's to 'a carved, mellow tower,
rising over France before the cathedral nave had come to rest,
like a Noah's Ark, on the hill of Laon, crammed with animals in
the act of escaping through the towers, and with oxen grazing
on the roof and looking down over the meadows of Champagne'.^1
Proust was delighted with the figures of the Liberal Arts in the
porch, which he enumerated three years afterwards to Mme
Catusse: 'Philosophy with the ladder of knowledge leaning
against her bosom, Astronomy with eyes fixed on the heavens,
Geometry with her compass and Arithmetic counting on her
fingers, Logic with her wise serpent, but rather a banal Medicine,
not as interesting as the one at Rheims who (if you will pardon
my saying so) is examining a patient's urine in a vase.' In
the same porch was a series of scenes from the life of the
Virgin; and he borrowed these for the sculptures in the
church at Balbec, which Elstir in his studio expounds to the
Narrator.^2
On the homeward journey that afternoon they stopped at
Couey, ten miles from Laon, to see the thirteenth-century castle,
'whose keep,' Proust had read in Viollet-le-Duc, 'is the finest
specimen of mediaeval military architecture in France: beside this
giant all others seem the merest spindles'. Here, too, Emmanuel
contrived that they should first see the castle from a point at the
foot of the hill" whence even its base showed high above the
tree-tops. The friends climbed the spiral staircase of the great
tower together. Marcel leaned on Fenelon's arm, while Fenelon,
to encourage his asthmatic companion, and because the day was
indeed Good Friday, sang the Good Friday-Spell motif from
Parsifal. When they reached the platform at the ~op, one hundred
and eighty feet from the ground, they gazed, in one of the eternal
moments of which Time Lost is made, on the flowering apple-
trees far below over the I1e-de-France, the last sunlight, the
1 II, '3
- I, 840