Proust Moment, May 18, 2003

The Apse of Combray

What's an apse? Here's our friend Henry Adams: "a semicircular space at the end of an axis of a church, intended to house an altar, and along the walls of which chapels may be arranged." Here are three pictures of the one at Chartres, to give you an idea: 1, 2, 3.

However, the apse of Combray looks nothing like the apse of Chartres. The apse of the church of Combray is ugly. But it is also, to our Narrator, what signifies the church, and the sight of an ugly apse ever since has served him as a kind of madeleine:

"And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that? It was so coarse, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the religious spirit. From outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with flints, in all of which there was nothing particularly ecclesiastical; the windows seemed to have been pierced at an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall rather than of a church. And certainly in later years, were I to recall all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never enter my mind to compare with any one of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day, turning out of a little street in some country town, I came upon three alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rubbed, worn, crumbling, and unusually high; with windows pierced in it far overhead and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that moment I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been expressed in its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed `The Church!'"

--"Combray," Swann's Way