All this, and still more the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper) because of which I used to advance into the church, as we made our way to our seats, as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement in a rock, a tree, a pond, the tangible traces of the little people’s supernatural passage — all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space — the name of the fourth being Time — extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep cleft had been hollowed out by the tower staircase, and veiling it even there by the graceful Gothic arcades which crowded coquettishly around it like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a rustic, surly and ill-dressed younger brother; raising up into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to see him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into a Merovingian darkness, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, powerfully ribbed like an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore and his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep cavity, like the bed of a fossil, had been dug, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had detached itself, of its own accord, from the golden chains by which it was suspended on the site of the present apse and, with neither the crystal being broken nor the light extinguished, had buried itself in the stone, which had softly given way beneath it.”
I couldn’t tell you if the above is indeed the longest sentence in C. K. Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s Way (let alone the whole of In Search of Lost Time) — it’s got stiff competition on nearly every page — but this particular beauty does run an exact page length across its 400+ words, breaking off in every way a sentence can — multiple clauses erupting through the syntax in parentheses, em dashes interjecting into em dashes, even allowing for two semicolons to cram in as many tangents as Proust (or his translator) deem necessary.
Something about Proust’s meander into deep time recalls John Cowper Powys’s own dive into the personification of nature, and when I’m feeling more coherent I’ll try to dissect that.
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