Swann's Way
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, in proportion to your
doll-like dimensions.
Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a model of virtue,
known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being
out for amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my father
asked himself how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
"I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was angry with us," he
said, "because among all those people in their Sunday clothes there
is something about him, with his little cut-away 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. Anyhow, my
father's fears were dissipated no later than the following evening.
As we returned from a long walk we saw, near the Pont-Vieux, Legrandin
himself, who, on account of the holidays, was spending a few days more
in Combray. He came up to us with outstretched hand: "Do you know,
master book-lover," he asked me, "this line of Paul Desjardins?
Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
Is not 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, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all
black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself,
as I am doing, by looking up to the sky." He took a cigarette from
his pocket and stood for a long time, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
"Goodbye, 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 colonel 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, and included 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 fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine
and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and
azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white
feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a
rainbow-loveliness 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, who, through the disguise which
covered their firm and edible 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 as the fairies in Shakespeare's
_Dream_) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower 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; sitting 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 would be finely and
separately outlined, star by star, as in Giotto's fresco are the flowers
banded about the brows, 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 sweet savour of her merits, and which, while
she was serving them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness
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, while my father took counsel with his family upon
our strange meeting with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen, 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 into arrears. When I went in, I saw
her in the back-kitchen which opened on to the courtyard, in process of
killing a chicken; by its desperate and quite natural resistance, which
Françoise, beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat
beneath the ear, accompanied with shrill cries of "Filthy creature!
Filthy creature!" it made the saintly kindness 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 mopped up its streaming blood, in which, however,
she did not let her rancour drown, 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, boiled 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, shewed a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest
of the world. In spite of which my aunt still retained her, for, while
conscious of her cruelty, she could appreciate her services. I began
gradually to realise that Françoise's kindness, her compunction, the
sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedies,
just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens
who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of
churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I had taken note of
the fact 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 which flowed from her
in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her,
in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a
more accurate 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' in the house. 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, where we would find
the measures of '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
bookcase 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 type of illness with which she was not
familiar. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would
exclaim: "Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes any
wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!"
But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of
Giotto's Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no
stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity which she
very well knew, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal
of newspapers; nor any other pleasure of the same kind in her sense of
weariness and irritation at being pulled out of bed in the middle of
the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very
sufferings, the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she
had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter
sarcasm, saying, when she thought that we had gone out of earshot:
"Well, she need never have done what she must have done to bring all
this about! She found that pleasant enough, I dare say! She had better
not put on any airs now. All the same, he must have been a god-forsaken
young man to go after _that_. Dear, dear, it's just as they used to say
in my poor mother's country:
Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails,
And dirty sluts in plenty,
Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses
When the heart is one-and-twenty."
Although, when her grandson had a slight cold in his head, she would set
off at night, even if she were ill also, instead of going to bed, to
see whether he had everything that he wanted, covering ten miles on foot
before daybreak so as to be in time to begin her work, this same love
for her own people, and her desire to establish the future greatness of
her house on a solid foundation reacted, in her policy with regard to
the other servants, in one unvarying maxim, which was never to let any
of them set foot in my aunt's room; indeed she shewed a sort of pride
in not allowing anyone else to come near my aunt, preferring, when she
herself was ill, to get out of bed and to administer the Vichy water in
person, rather than to concede to the kitchen-maid the right of entry
into her mistress's presence. There is a species of hymenoptera,
observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a
supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls
in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive
cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds
with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which
their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions)
depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid,