Swann's Way
idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though it had
slipped, with his latchkey, from his waistcoat pocket, he would point
out to us, when it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own
garden, which had come hand-in-hand with the familiar corner of the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, to await us, to greet us at the end of our wanderings
over paths unknown. My mother would murmur admiringly "You really are
wonderful!" And from that instant I had not to take another step; the
ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where, for so long,
my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my
will. Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to
my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.
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 even greater variation, that she did not
pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something
different from what one has, when those people 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, in
their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion
(even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has
silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again
by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when
the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue its
impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled
desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins
into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. Of
course, since my aunt's strength, which was completely drained by the
slightest exertion, returned but drop by drop into the pool of her
repose, the reservoir was very slow in filling, and months would go by
before she reached that surplus which other people use up in their daily
activities, but which she had no idea--and could never decide how to
employ. 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 was never 'tired'--she would extract
from the accumulation of those monotonous days (on which she so much
depended) a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, instantaneous
in its happening, 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, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one 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 nothing of this sort had ever
occurred, though indeed she must often have pondered the success of
such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of
patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the first
moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen
facts, 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 imagining other, minor
catastrophes, which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile
herself with a sudden suspicion 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 apologies, 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 pushed awry 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 murmuring 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 in Eulalie her
doubts of Françoise's integrity and her determination to be rid of her,
and on another day she would confide in Françoise her suspicions of the
disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed
for good. A few days more, and, disgusted with her latest confidant, she
would again be 'as thick as thieves' with the traitor, while, before the
next performance, the two would once more have changed their parts. But
the suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally breed in her were no
more than a fire of straw, which must soon subside for lack of fuel,
since Eulalie was not living with her in the house. It was a very
different matter when the suspect was Françoise, of whose presence under
the same roof as herself my aunt was perpetually conscious, while for
fear of catching cold, were she to leave her bed, she would never dare
go downstairs to the kitchen to see for herself whether there was,
indeed, any foundation for her suspicions. And so on by degrees, until
her mind had no other occupation than to attempt, at every hour of the
day, to discover what was being done, what was being concealed from her
by Françoise. She would detect the most furtive movement of Françoise's
features, something contradictory in what she was saying, some desire
which she appeared to be screening. And she would shew her that she was
unmasked, by, a single word, which made Françoise turn pale, and which
my aunt seemed to find a cruel satisfaction in driving into her unhappy
servant's heart. And the very next Sunday a disclosure by Eulalie--like
one of those discoveries which suddenly open up an unsuspected field
for exploration to some new science which has hitherto followed only
the beaten paths--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 have given her a carriage."
"Now that I have given her a carriage!" gasped my aunt.
"Oh, but I didn't know; I only thought so; I saw her go by yesterday in
her open coach, as proud as Artaban, on her way to Roussainville market.
I supposed that it must be Mme. Octave who had given it to her."
So on by degrees, until Françoise and my aunt, the quarry and the
hunter, could never cease from trying to forestall each other's devices.
My mother was afraid lest Françoise should develop a genuine hatred of
my aunt, who was doing everything in her power to annoy 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 for anything she would hesitate, first, for a long time,
making up her mind how best to begin. 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 in this way--whereas an artist who had been reading memoirs of the
seventeenth century, and wished to bring himself nearer to the great
Louis, would consider that he was making progress in that direction when
he constructed a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic
family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of the reigning
Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his eyes to the mistake he was
making in seeking to establish a similarity by an exact and therefore
lifeless copy of mere outward forms--a middle-aged lady in a small
country town, by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to her
own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief engendered
by the utter idleness of her existence, could see, without ever having
given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily
life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by
virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was
to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the 'machinery' of life at
Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence,
a shade of good humour or of arrogance 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 arrogance of the King
when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition
to him, at the turning of 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 night, 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 went wrong again to-day, Léonie," she said kindly,
"you have had all your friends here at once."
And my great-aunt interrupted with: "Too many good things..." for, since
her daughter's illness, she felt herself in duty bound to revive her as
far as possible 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 am 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 passed M. Legrandin; instead, I went
downstairs to the kitchen to ask for the bill of fare 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