Swann's Way
skin had stained part of her cheeks and her crooked nose the bright red
colour of balsam. Her visits were the one great distraction in the life
of my aunt Léonie, who now saw hardly anyone else, except the reverend
Curé. My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from
her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her eyes,
of falling into one or other of the two categories of people she most
detested. One group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid
herself first, consisted of those who advised her not to take so much
care of herself, and preached (even if only negatively and with no
outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting
smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two dreadful sips
of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours!) than all her medicine
bottles and her bed. The other category was composed of people who
appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought,
in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said. And so none of those
whom she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation
and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their visit
had shewn how unworthy they were of the honour which had been done them
by venturing a timid: "Don't you think that if you were just to stir out
a little on really fine days...?" or who, on the other hand, when she
said to them: "I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!"
had replied: "Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may
last a while yet"; each party alike might be certain that her doors
would never open to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look
of consternation on my aunt's face whenever she saw, from her bed, any
of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit, who looked as if they were
coming to see her, or heard her own door-bell ring, she would laugh far
more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt's devices (which never
failed) for having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture
when they had to turn back without having seen her; and would be filled
with secret admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior
to all these other people, inasmuch as she could and did contrive not to
see them. In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that
whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate
with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery.
In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in
a minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times
Eulalie would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme.
Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only
yesterday." For one of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the
formidable list of corrections which her experience must have compiled
was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme.
Sazerin.
"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she
preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.
And since, besides this, Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to
distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place
regularly every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent
them, were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on
those days in a state of expectation, appetising enough to begin with,
but at once changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if
Eulalie were a minute late in coming. For, if unduly prolonged, the
rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never
cease from looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of
her symptoms in turn. Eulalie's ring, if it sounded from the front door
at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would
almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of
nothing else than this visit, and the moment that our luncheon was ended
Françoise would become impatient for us to leave the dining-room so that
she might go upstairs to 'occupy' my aunt. But--and this more than ever
from the day on which fine weather definitely set in at Combray--the
proud hour of noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which
it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonorous crown,
would long have echoed about our table, beside the 'holy bread,' which
too had come in, after church, in its familiar way; and we would still
be found seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed down
by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal. For upon
the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and
biscuits, whose appearance on the table she no longer announced to us,
Françoise would add--as the labour of fields and orchards, the harvest
of the tides, the luck of the markets, the kindness of neighbours, and
her own genius might provide; and so effectively that our bill of fare,
like the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals
in the thirteenth century, reflected to some extent the march of the
seasons and the incidents of human life--a brill, because the fish-woman
had guaranteed its freshness; a turkey, because she had seen a beauty
in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin; cardoons with marrow, because she
had never done them for us in that way before; a roast leg of mutton,
because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time
for it to 'settle down' in the seven hours before dinner; spinach,
by way of a change; apricots, because they were still hard to get;
gooseberries, because in another fortnight there would be none left;
raspberries, which M. Swann had brought specially; cherries, the first
to come from the cherry-tree, which had yielded none for the last two
years; a cream cheese, of which in those days I was extremely fond; an
almond cake, because she had ordered one the evening before; a fancy
loaf, because it was our turn to 'offer' the holy bread. And when all
these had been eaten, a work composed expressly for ourselves, but
dedicated more particularly to my father, who had a fondness for such
things, a cream of chocolate, inspired in the mind, created by the
hand of Françoise, would be laid before us, light and fleeting as an
'occasional piece' of music, into which she had poured the whole of her
talent. Anyone who refused to partake of it, saying: "No, thank you, I
have finished; I am not hungry," would at once have been lowered to the
level of the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a present of one
of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value
is the creator's intention and his signature. To have left even the
tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as much discourtesy as to
rise and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was still being played,
and under the composer's very eyes.
At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day;
you can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little
fresh air first; don't start reading immediately after your food."
And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented
here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander, which modelled
upon a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its slender,
allegorical body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a
lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which communicated, by
a service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected
soil rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house itself and
apparently a separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see
its red-tiled floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the
cave of Françoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing
with the offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come
sometimes from distant villages to dedicate here the first-fruits of
their fields. And its roof was always surmounted by the cooing of a
dove.
In earlier days I would not have lingered in the sacred grove which
surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I would
steal into the little sitting-room which my uncle Adolphe, a brother of
my grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a
major, used to occupy on the ground floor, a room which, even when its
opened windows let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun
which seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to emit that vague and
yet fresh odour, suggesting at once an open-air and an old-fashioned
kind of existence, which sets and keeps the nostrils dreaming when one
goes into a disused gun-room. But for some years now I had not gone into
my uncle Adolphe's room, since he no longer came to Combray on account
of a quarrel which had arisen between him and my family, by my fault,
and in the following circumstances: Once or twice every month, in Paris,
I used to be sent to pay him a. visit, as he was finishing his luncheon,
wearing a plain alpaca coat, and waited upon by his servant in a
working-jacket of striped linen, purple and white. He would complain
that I had not been to see him for a long time; that he was being
neglected; he would offer me a marchpane or a tangerine, and we would
cross a room in which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted,
whose walls were picked out with gilded mouldings, its ceiling painted
blue in imitation of the sky, and its furniture upholstered in satin, as
at my grandparents', only yellow; then we would enter what he called his
'study,' a room whose walls were hung with prints which shewed, against
a dark background, a plump and rosy goddess driving a car, or standing
upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow; pictures which were popular
under the Second Empire because there was thought to be something about
them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and
which now people are beginning to collect again for one single and
consistent reason (despite any others which they may advance), namely,
that they suggest the Second Empire. And there I would stay with my
uncle until his man came, with a message from the coachman, to ask him
at what time he would like the carriage. My uncle would then be lost
in meditation, while his astonished servant stood there, not daring to
disturb him by the least movement, wondering and waiting for his
answer, which never varied. For in the end, after a supreme crisis of
hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: "A quarter past
two," which the servant would echo with amazement, but without disputing
them: "A quarter past two! Very good, sir... I will go and tell him...."
At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of
necessity, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and
so incorrect was the picture I drew for myself of the pleasures to be
enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked,
as into a stereoscope, upon a stage and scenery which existed for
himself alone, though closely resembling the thousand other spectacles
presented to the rest of the audience individually.
Every morning I would hasten to the Moriss column to see what new plays
it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the
dreams with which these announcements filled my mind, dreams which took
their form from the inevitable associations of the words forming the
title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills, still damp and
wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless
it were such strange titles as the _Testament de César Girodot, or