In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  Although Saturday, by beginning an hour earlier and by depriving her of the services of Françoise, passed more slowly than other days for my aunt, yet the moment it was past and a new week begun, she would look forward with impatience to its return, as something that embodied all the novelty and distraction which her frail and disordered body was still able to endure. This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel. Of course, since my aunt’s strength, which was completely drained by the slightest exertion, returned but drop by drop into the depths of her repose, the reservoir was very slow in filling, and months would go by before she reached that slight overflow which other people siphon off into activity of various kinds and which she was incapable of knowing or deciding how to use. And I have no doubt that then—just as a desire to have her potatoes served with béchamel sauce for a change would be formed, ultimately, from the pleasure she found in the daily reappearance of those mashed potatoes of which she never “tired”—she would extract from the accumulation of those monotonous days which she treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt well and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire in which all the rest of us had already perished and which soon would leave not a single stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall. Inasmuch as no such event had ever occurred, though she must often have pondered its eventuality as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of patience (and though it would have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen contingencies, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imaginary calamities which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile herself with a sudden pretence that Françoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by herself, of playing her own and her adversary’s hands at once, she would first stammer out Françoise’s awkward excuses, and then reply to them with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her eyes blazing, her false hair askew and exposing the baldness of her brows. Françoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt’s feelings sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of substance and reality which she added to them by muttering them half-aloud. Sometimes, however, even these counterpane dramas would not satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged. And so, on a Sunday, with all the doors mysteriously closed, she would confide to Eulalie her doubts of Françoise’s integrity and her determination to be rid of her, and another time she would confide to Françoise her suspicions of the disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed for good. A few days later she would be sick of her latest confidante and once more “as thick as thieves” with the traitor, but before the next performance, the two would yet again have changed roles. But the suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally arouse in her were no more than a flash in the pan that soon subsided for lack of fuel, since Eulalie was not living with her in the house. It was a very different matter in the case of Françoise, of whose presence under the same roof as herself my aunt was perpetually conscious, though for fear of catching cold were she to leave her bed, she would never dare go down to the kitchen to establish whether there were any grounds for her suspicions. Gradually her mind came to be exclusively occupied with trying to guess what Françoise might at any given moment be doing behind her back. She would detect a furtive look on Françoise’s face, something contradictory in what she said, some desire which she appeared to be concealing. And she would show her that she was unmasked, with a single word, which made Françoise turn pale and which my aunt seemed to find a cruel satisfaction in driving deep into her unhappy servant’s heart. And the very next Sunday a disclosure by Eulalie—like one of those discoveries that suddenly open up an unsuspected field of exploration for some new science that has got into something of a rut—proved to my aunt that her own worst suspicions fell a long way short of the appalling truth. “But Françoise ought to know that,” said Eulalie, “now that you’ve given her a carriage.”

  “Now that I’ve given her a carriage!” gasped my aunt.

  “Oh, I know nothing about it, I just thought, well, I saw her go by yesterday in a barouche, as proud as Lucifer, on her way to Roussainville market. I supposed that it must be Mme Octave who had given it to her.”

  And so by degrees Françoise and my aunt, the quarry and the hunter, had reached the point of constantly trying to forestall each other’s ruses. My mother was afraid lest Françoise should develop a genuine hatred of my aunt, who did everything in her power to hurt her. However that might be, Françoise had come, more and more, to pay an infinitely scrupulous attention to my aunt’s least word and gesture. When she had to ask her anything she would hesitate for a long time over how best to go about it. And when she had uttered her request, she would watch my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the expression on her face what she thought of it and how she would reply. And so it was that—whereas an artist who, reading the memoirs of the seventeenth century, and, wishing to bring himself nearer to the great Louis, considers that he is making progress in that direction by constructing a pedigree that traces his own descent from some historic family, or by engaging in correspondence with one of the reigning sovereigns of Europe, is actually turning his back on what he mistakenly seeks under identical and therefore moribund forms—an elderly provincial lady, by doing no more than yield wholeheartedly to her own irresistible eccentricities and a cruelty born of idleness, could see, without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her lunch, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon called the “mechanics” of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silences, a suggestion of good humour or of haughtiness on her features, would provide Françoise
with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror as did the silence, the good humour or the haughtiness of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition to him in an avenue at Versailles.

  One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé and from Eulalie, and had been left alone, afterwards, to rest, the whole family went upstairs to bid her good evening, and Mamma ventured to condole with her on the unlucky coincidence that always brought both visitors to her door at the same time.

  “I hear that things worked out badly again today, Léonie,” she said kindly, “you had all your friends here at once.”

  And my great-aunt interrupted with: “The more the merrier,” for, since her daughter’s illness, she felt herself in duty bound to cheer her up by always drawing her attention to the brighter side of things. But my father had begun to speak.

  “I should like to take advantage,” he said, “of the whole family’s being here together to tell you a story, so as not to have to begin all over again to each of you separately. I’m afraid we are in M. Legrandin’s bad books: he would hardly say ‘How d’ye do’ to me this morning.”

  I did not wait to hear the end of my father’s story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.

  As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church, walking by the side of a lady, the owner of a country house in the neighbourhood, whom we knew only by sight, my father had saluted him in a manner at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk; M. Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and with that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable and who, from the suddenly receding depths of their eyes, seem to have caught sight of you at the far end of an interminably straight road and at so great a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, commensurate with your doll-like dimensions.

  Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a virtuous and highly respected person; there could be no question of his being out for amorous adventure and embarrassed at being detected, and my father wondered how he could possibly have displeased our friend.

  “I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was vexed with us,” he said, “because among all those people in their Sunday best there is something about him, with his little cutaway coat and his soft neckties, so little ‘dressed-up,’ so genuinely simple; an air of innocence, almost, which is really attractive.”

  But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that my father had imagined the whole thing, or that Legrandin, at the moment in question, had been preoccupied in thinking about something else. In any case my father’s fears were dispelled no later than the following evening. Returning from a long walk, we saw Legrandin near the Pont-Vieux (he was spending a few days more in Combray because of the holidays). He came up to us with outstretched hand: “Do you know, master booklover,” he asked me, “this line of Paul Desjardins?

  Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

  Isn’t that a fine rendering of a moment like this? Perhaps you have never read Paul Desjardins. Read him, my boy, read him; in these days he is converted, they tell me, into a preaching friar, but he used to have the most charming water-colour touch—

  Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

  May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.” He took a cigarette from his pocket and stood for a long time with his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Good-bye, friends!” he suddenly exclaimed, and left us.

  At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Françoise, a commanding officer with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stirring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right moment, finishing over the fire those culinary masterpieces which had been first got ready in some of the great array of vessels, triumphs of the potter’s craft, which ranged from tubs and boilers and cauldrons and fish kettles down to jars for game, moulds for pastry, and tiny pannikins for cream, through an entire collection of pots and pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare’s fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.

  Poor Giotto’s Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Françoise with the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside her in a basket, while she sat there with a mournful air as though all the sorrows of the world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which capped the asparagus shoots above their pink jackets were delicately outlined, star by star, as, in Giotto’s fresco, are the flowers encircling the brow or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua. And meanwhile Françoise would be turning on the spit one of those chickens such as she alone knew how to roast, chickens which had wafted far abroad from Combray the savour of her merits, and which, while she was serving them to us at table, would make the quality of sweetness predominate for the moment in my private conception of her character, the aroma of that cooked flesh which she knew how to make so unctuous and so tender seeming to me no more than the proper perfume of one of her many virtues.

  But the day on which I went down to the kitchen while my father consulted the family council about our strange meeting with Legrandin was one of those days when Giotto’s Charity, still very weak and ill after her recent confinement, had been unable to rise from her bed; Françoise, being without assistance, had fallen behind. When I went in, I saw her in the scullery which opened on to the back yard, in the process of killing a chicken which, by its desperate and quite natural resistance, accompanied by Françoise, beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat beneath the ear, with shrill cries of “Filthy creature! Filthy creature!,” made the saintly meekness and unction of our servant rather less prominent than it would do, next day at dinner, when it made its appearance in a skin gold-embroidered like a chasuble, and its precious juice was poured out drop by drop as from a pyx. When it was dead, Françoise collected its streaming blood, which did not, however, drown her rancour, for she gave vent to another burst of rage, and gazing down at the carcass of her enemy, uttered a final “Filthy creature!”

  I crept out of the kitchen and upstairs, trembling all over; I could have prayed, then, for the instant dismissal of Françoise. But who would have baked me such hot rolls, made me such fragrant coffee, and even … roasted me such chickens? And, as it happened, everyone else had already had to make the same cowardly reckoning. For my aunt Léonie knew (though I was still in ignorance of this) that Françoise, who, for her own daughter or for her
nephews, would have given her life without a murmur, showed a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest of the world. In spite of which my aunt had kept her, for, while conscious of her cruelty, she appreciated her services. I began gradually to realise that Françoise’s kindness, her compunction, her numerous virtues, concealed many of these kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with their hands joined in prayer in the windows of churches were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I came to recognise that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself. The tears that flowed from her in torrents when she read in a newspaper of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more precise mental picture of the victims. One night, shortly after her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized with the most appalling pains; Mamma heard her groans, and rose and awakened Françoise, who, quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that the girl wanted to “play the mistress.” The doctor, who had been afraid of some such attack, had left a marker in a medical dictionary which we had, at the page on which the symptoms were described, and had told us to turn up this passage to discover the first aid to be adopted. My mother sent Françoise to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour elapsed, and Françoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me to go myself to the library and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found Françoise who, in her curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read the clinical account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing, now that it was a question of a prototype patient with whom she was unacquainted. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would exclaim: “Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes a wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!”