Swann's Way
those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could
taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before
I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time
in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to
warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides
and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot,
making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in
the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under
which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or
snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of
shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to
and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each
one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking
like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room was
thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had
already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and
fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable
country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour
the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells
of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper
I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the
nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the
flowered quilt.
In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might
displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when
alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good
for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it
would make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she
was liable; besides, in the life of complete inertia which she led she
attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance,
endowed them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to
keep them secret, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate
them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue
which was her sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the
habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there
was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying
to herself: "I must not forget that I never slept a wink"--for "never
sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted
and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Françoise
would not 'call' her, but would simply 'come to' her; during the day,
when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished
to 'be quiet' or to 'rest'; and when in conversation she so far forgot
herself as to say "what made me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she would
flush and at once correct herself.
After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Françoise would
be making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask
instead for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of
the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom
required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had
twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale
flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping
them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered
their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous
things imaginable, as though the transparent wings of flies or the blank
sides of labels or the petals of roses had been collected and pounded,
or interwoven as birds weave the material for their nests. A
thousand trifling little details--the charming prodigality of the
chemist--details which would have been eliminated from an artificial
preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the
name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were
indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming from the
train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they were not
imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old. And as each
new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these
little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but
beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms
among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden
roses--marking, as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place
of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree
which had and those which had not been 'in bloom'--shewed me that these
were petals which, before their flowering-time, the chemist's package
had embalmed on warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still
their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life
which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower.
Presently my aunt was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she
would relish the savour of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of
which she would hold out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.
At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of
lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as pharmacy and as
high altar, on which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of
Vichy-Célestins, might be found her service-books and her medical
prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed,
of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and
for vespers. On the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she
had the street beneath her eyes, and would read in it from morning to
night to divert the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily
but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail
afterwards with Françoise.
I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would send me
away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad
brow, pale and lifeless, on which at this early hour she would not yet
have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone like the
points of a crown of thorns--or the beads of a rosary, and she would say
to me: "Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for
mass; and if you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too
long amusing herself with you; she must come up soon to see if I want
anything."
Françoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did not
at that time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to
ours, was a little inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we
spent in her house. There had been in my infancy, before we first went
to Combray, and when my aunt Léonie used still to spend the winter in
Paris with her mother, a time when I knew Françoise so little that on
New Year's Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother put
a five-franc piece in my hand and said: "Now, be careful. Don't make
any mistake. Wait until you hear me say 'Good morning, Françoise,' and
I touch your arm before you give it to her." No sooner had we arrived
in my aunt's dark hall than we saw in the gloom, beneath the frills of a
snowy cap as stiff and fragile as if it had been made of spun sugar, the
concentric waves of a smile of anticipatory gratitude. It was Françoise,
motionless and erect, framed in the small doorway of the corridor like
the statue of a saint in its niche. When we had grown more accustomed to
this religious darkness we could discern in her features a disinterested
love of all humanity, blended with a tender respect for the 'upper
classes' which raised to the most honourable quarter of her heart the
hope of receiving her due reward. Mamma pinched my arm sharply and said
in a loud voice: "Good morning, Françoise." At this signal my fingers
parted and I let fall the coin, which found a receptacle in a confused
but outstretched hand. But since we had begun to go to Combray there was
no one I knew better than Françoise. We were her favourites, and in the
first years at least, while she shewed the same consideration for us
as for my aunt, she enjoyed us with a keener relish, because we had, in
addition to our dignity as part of 'the family' (for she had for those
invisible bonds by which community of blood unites the members of a
family as much respect as any Greek tragedian), the fresh charm of not
being her customary employers. And so with what joy would she welcome
us, with what sorrow complain that the weather was still so bad for us,
on the day of our arrival, just before Easter, when there was often an
icy wind; while Mamma inquired after her daughter and her nephews, and
if her grandson was good-looking, and what they were going to make of
him, and whether he took after his granny.
Later, when no one else was in the room, Mamma, who knew that Françoise
was still mourning for her parents, who had been dead for years, would
speak of them kindly, asking her endless little questions about them and
their lives.
She had guessed that Françoise was not over-fond of her son-in-law, and
that he spoiled the pleasure she found in visiting her daughter, as the
two could not talk so freely when he was there. And so one day, when
Françoise was going to their house, some miles from Combray, Mamma said
to her, with a smile: "Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away,
and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but
will make the best of it, won't you?"
And Françoise answered, laughing: "Madame knows everything; Madame
is worse than the X-rays" (she pronounced 'x' with an affectation
of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered
woman's, daring to employ a scientific term) "they brought here for Mme.
Octave, which see what is in your heart"--and she went off, disturbed
that anyone should be caring about her, perhaps anxious that we should
not see her in tears: Mamma was the first person who had given her the
pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys
and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or
pleasure to some one other than herself.
My aunt resigned herself to doing without Françoise to some extent
during our visits, knowing how much my mother appreciated the services
of so active and intelligent a maid, one who looked as smart at five
o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and
dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for
churchgoing; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a
horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the
appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when
Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually
boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least
satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take
no pains to make a conquest of him and shew him no special attention,
knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease
to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it;
who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and
mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not
look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability,
which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter