Derived not from books

The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, as precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St. Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less "righteous." One could see that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, distorted, unrecognizable, and alive.

The narrator, in his elusive way, manages to put us inside a country church as he was just a moment earlier remembering a certain walk he and his family would take in the environs of Combray. We end up inside the church because he is remembering how they might take shelter there if it had begun raining while out on the walk. And there we are, both smoothly and abruptly, present with his memories about the church's interior. He recalls in particular the carved stone depictions of ancient saints and kings. The leaps he makes here are wonderful, and quite funny. Do not underestimate Proust's sense of humor.

We also see here one of the book's abiding, if subtle, themes: the disappearance of the remnants of feudal Europe, once and for all. Proust was on the scene as the ancient gave way to the modern, and noticed it, meditated on it, and commented on it. Maybe others were making similar comments at the time, but his are the ones with which we have largely been left.