MARCEL PROUSTfaith in a letter to Lauris. Over the ruins of the Church he saw
Saint-Jacques at Illiers; the exiled priests took on the face of the
good Canon Marquis; and the argument about politics led him
back to his childhood at Illiers, further than he had ever yet
penetrated into Time Lost.
Two days before, on 27 July, Dr Proust had visited Illiers, for
what was destined to be the last time, to preside over the prize-
giving at the boys' school. But Canon Marquis was absent: since
the anti-clerical laws of Jules Ferry in 1882 he had never been
invited, and Proust's uncle Jules Amiot, now deputy mayor and
a reader of both the priest-baiting L'Intransigeant and the anti-
Semitic Lihre Purole, refused even to speak to the constant
visitor of his dead wife. Lauris and Fenelon supported the
expulsion of the religious orders in the name of French unity; but
would it forward unity if the Canon was exiled and Saint-Jacques
secularised? 'I remember that little town crouching to the earth,'
he wrote to Lauris, 'that avaricious earth, mother of avarice,
where the only impulse towards the sky--often dappled with
clouds, but often, too, of a heavenly blue, transfigured every
evening in the sunsets of the Beauce-is the exquisite spire of
the church; I remember the priest who taught me Latin and the
names of the flowers in his garden; and I think it unjust that he
should not be invited on prize-day as representing in the town
something harder to define than the social functions symbolised
by the chemist, the retired tax-collector, or the optician, yet none
the less worthy of respect-were it only for the intelligent, de-
materialised spire of his church, which points to the sunset, melts
so lovingly into the pink clouds, and strikes a stranger arriving
in the village as having a nobler air, more disinterestedness, more
intelligence and more love than other buildings,'-such as the
new, secular school-'however recent the laws that have erected
them ... Supposing the religious orders were expelled, and the
fire of Catholicism quenched in France (if it could be quenched,
whereas in fact it is not by legislation that ideas and faiths perish,
but when the truth or social utility they possessed is corrupted
or diminished), then our clericalist unbelievers would only be
more violently anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard, anti-liberal than
ever; they would be no fewer in number, but a hundred times
worse ... You can't kill the Christian spirit by closing Christian
schools, and if it is destined to die, it will die even under a