Swann's Way
drops, feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we
would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game, now,
among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a
stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and
hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly it splashed plump
upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree.
Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony
saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs. How
typically French that church was! Over its door the saints, the kings
of chivalry with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals
were carved as they might have been in the mind of Françoise. The
sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil,
precisely as Françoise in her kitchen would break into speech about
Saint Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to
depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered
less 'righteous.' One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval
artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in
the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history,
ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were
derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct,
unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray
person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic
sculptures of Saint-André-des-Champs was young Théodore, the assistant
in Camus's shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was well aware that she
had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill
for Françoise to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry
her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs
and, perhaps, 'make an impression' on my aunt, she would send out for
Théodore. And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town
as a 'bad character,' was so abounding in that spirit which had served
to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, and particularly in the
feelings of respect due, in Françoise eyes, to all 'poor invalids,' and,
above all, to her own 'poor mistress,' that he had, when he bent down
to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of préraphaélite
simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the bas-reliefs wear, who
throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed of Our Lady, as
though those carved faces of stone, naked and grey like trees in winter,
were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower
again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of
Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels, but
detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her
pedestal as upon a footstool, which had been placed there to save her
feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full
cheeks, the firm breasts which swelled out inside her draperies like
a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and
stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous
expression of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which
imparted to the statue itself a kindliness that I had not looked to
find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from
the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose
presence there--as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up
beside leaves carved in stone--seemed intended by fate to allow us, by
confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate
of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a
promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had
never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for
us, still being chastised, like a village in the Old Testament, by
all the innumerable spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down
obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already
received the forgiveness of the Almighty, Who had restored to it the
light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of uneven length, like the
rays of a monstrance upon an altar.
Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go
home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there, in the distance, in
a landscape which, what with the failing light and saturated atmosphere,
resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower
slopes of a hill whose heights were buried in a cloudy darkness shone
out like little boats which had folded their sails and would ride at
anchor, all night, upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm?
In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial
ill-temper expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very
different thing from the fluid and unstable 'fine weather' of winter,
its very opposite, in fact; for has it not (firmly established in the
soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over
which the rain may pour in torrents without weakening the resistance
offered by their real and lasting happiness) hoisted, to keep them
flying throughout the season, in the village streets, on the walls of
the houses and in their gardens, its silken banners, violet and white.
Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner
with a book, I might hear the water dripping from our chestnut-trees,
but I would know that the shower would only glaze and brighten the
greenness of their thick, crumpled leaves, and that they themselves
had undertaken to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the
rainy night, to assure me of the fine weather's continuing; it might
rain as it pleased, but to-morrow, over the white fence of Tansonville,
there would surge and flow, numerous as ever, a sea of little
heart-shaped leaves; and without the least anxiety I could watch the
poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying for mercy, bowing in desperation
before the storm; without the least anxiety I could hear, at the far end
of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among our lilac-trees.
If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the idea of
a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit
of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards
Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray
to settle the division of my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at
last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the
fact of her demise--those who had insisted that her mode of life was
enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had
always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary,
but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would
be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it;
causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that
one a grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my
aunt's last illness Françoise never went out of her room for an instant,
never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my
aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave.
Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise
had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had
developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which
was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it
had been impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been
so hard to escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take
advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no
more. Compared with such a mistress we counted for very little. The
time had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays
at Combray, we had been of equal importance, in Françoise eyes, with my
aunt.
During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with
the legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions with
solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it
happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them,
along the 'Méséglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid which
protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw
over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan
scandalised Françoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the
colour of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning
for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the
neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone
when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I
am sure that in a book--and to that extent my feelings were closely akin
to those of Françoise--such a conception of mourning, in the manner
of the _Chanson de Roland_ and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs,
would have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Françoise herself
approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry,
and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I
regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of
her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that
she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her
death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a
book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused
reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to
plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to
_espress_ myself"--I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal
common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same
she was a _geological_ relation; there is always the respect due to your
_geology_," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good
of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot
speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise,
the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most
contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too
prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage
of life.
My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used
to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of
reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid
across my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of
enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was
now obliged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in
every direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees
of Roussainville wood, the bushes against which Montjouvain leaned its
back, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must
hear my shouts of happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than
expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not
being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the
light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course
of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an
immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the
emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us