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
barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the
least trace of individuality.
When Françoise, having seen that my parents had everything they
required, first went upstairs again to give my aunt her pepsin and to
find out from her what she would take for luncheon, very few mornings
pased but she was called upon to give an opinion, or to furnish an
explanation, in regard to some important event.
"Just fancy, Françoise, Mme. Goupil went by more than a quarter of an
hour late to fetch her sister: if she loses any more time on the way I
should not be at all surprised if she got in after the Elevation."
"Well, there'd be nothing wonderful in that," would be the answer. Or:
"Françoise, if you had come in five minutes ago, you would have seen
Mme. Imbert go past with some asparagus twice the size of what mother
Callot has: do try to find out from her cook where she got them. You
know you've been putting asparagus in all your sauces this spring; you
might be able to get some like these for our visitors."
"I shouldn't be surprised if they came from the Curé's," Françoise would
say, and:
"I'm sure you wouldn't, my poor Françoise," my aunt would reply, raising
her shoulders. "From the Curé's, indeed! You know quite well that he
can never grow anything but wretched little twigs of asparagus, not
asparagus at all. I tell you these ones were as thick as my arm. Not
your arm, of course, but my poor arm, which has grown so much thinner
again this year." Or:
"Françoise, didn't you hear that bell just now! It split my head."
"No, Mme. Octave."
"Ah, poor girl, your skull must be very thick; you may thank God for
that. It was Maguelone come to fetch Dr. Piperaud. He came out with her
at once and they went off along the Rue de l'Oiseau. There must be some
child ill."
"Oh dear, dear; the poor little creature!" would come with a sigh from
Françoise, who could not hear of any calamity befalling a person unknown
to her, even in some distant part of the world, without beginning to
lament. Or:
"Françoise, for whom did they toll the passing-bell just now? Oh dear,
of course, it would be for Mme. Rousseau. And to think that I had
forgotten that she passed away the other night. Indeed, it is time the
Lord called me home too; I don't know what has become of my head since I
lost my poor Octave. But I am wasting your time, my good girl."
"Indeed no, Mme. Octave, my time is not so precious; whoever made our
time didn't sell it to us. I am just going to see that my fire hasn't
gone out."
In this way Françoise and my aunt made a critical valuation between
them, in the course of these morning sessions, of the earliest
happenings of the day. But sometimes these happenings assumed so
mysterious or so alarming an air that my aunt felt she could not wait
until it was time for Françoise to come upstairs, and then a formidable
and quadruple peal would resound through the house.
"But, Mme. Octave, it is not time for your pepsin," Françoise would
begin. "Are you feeling faint?"
"No, thank you, Françoise," my aunt would reply, "that is to say, yes;
for you know well that there is very seldom a time when I don't feel
faint; one day I shall pass away like Mme. Rousseau, before I know where
I am; but that is not why I rang. Would you believe that I have just
seen, as plainly as I see you, Mme. Goupil with a little girl I didn't
know at all. Run and get a pennyworth of salt from Camus. It's not often
that Théodore can't tell you who a person is."
"But that must be M. Pupin's daughter," Françoise would say, preferring
to stick to an immediate explanation, since she had been perhaps twice
already into Camus's shop that morning.
"M. Pupin's daughter! Oh, that's a likely story, my poor Françoise. Do
you think I should not have recognised M. Pupin's daughter!"
"But I don't mean the big one, Mme. Octave; I mean the little girl, he
one who goes to school at Jouy. I seem to have seen her once already this
morning."
"Oh, if that's what it is!" my aunt would say, "she must have come over
for the holidays. Yes, that is it. No need to ask, she will have come
over for the holidays. But then we shall soon see Mme. Sazerat come
along and ring her sister's door-bell, for her luncheon. That will be
it! I saw the boy from Galopin's go by with a tart. You will see that
the tart was for Mme. Goupil."
"Once Mme. Goupil has anyone in the house, Mme. Octave, you won't be
long in seeing all her folk going in to their luncheon there, for it's
not so early as it was," would be the answer, for Françoise, who was
anxious to retire downstairs to look after our own meal, was not sorry
to leave my aunt with the prospect of such a distraction.
"Oh! not before midday!" my aunt would reply in a tone of resignation,
darting an uneasy glance at the clock, but stealthily, so as not to let
it be seen that she, who had renounced all earthly joys, yet found a
keen satisfaction in learning that Mme. Goupil was expecting company to
luncheon, though, alas, she must wait a little more than an hour still
before enjoying the spectacle. "And it will come in the middle of
my luncheon!" she would murmur to herself. Her luncheon was such a
distraction in itself that she did not like any other to come at the
same time. "At least, you will not forget to give me my creamed eggs on
one of the flat plates?" These were the only plates which had pictures
on them and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the
description on whichever might have been sent up to her. She would
put on her spectacles and spell out: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,"
"Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," and smile, and say "Very good indeed."
"I may as well go across to Camus..." Françoise would hazard, seeing
that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.
"No, no; it's not worth while now; it's certain to be the Pupin girl. My
poor Françoise, I am sorry to have made you come upstairs for nothing."
But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for
Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one 'didn't know at all' was
as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and it was apt to be
forgotten that after each occasion on which there had appeared in the
Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenomena,
careful and exhaustive researches had invariably reduced the fabulous
monster to the proportions of a person whom one 'did know,' either
personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more
or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to
be Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbé Perdreau's
niece come home from her convent, or the Curé's brother, a tax-collector
at Châteaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to
Combray for the holidays. On first noticing them you have been impressed
by the thought that there might be in Combray people whom you 'didn't
know at all,' simply because you had failed to recognise or identify
them at once. And yet long beforehand Mme. Sauton and the Curé had given
warning that they expected their 'strangers.' In the evening, when I
came in and went upstairs to tell my aunt the incidents of our walk, if
I was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the Pont-Vieux,
a man whom my grandfather didn't know:
"A man grandfather didn't know at all!" she would exclaim. "That's a
likely story." None the less, she would be a little disturbed by
the news, she would wish to have the details correctly, and so my
grandfather would be summoned. "Who can it have been that you passed
near the Pont-Vieux, uncle? A man you didn't know at all?"
"Why, of course I did," my grandfather would answer; "it was Prosper,
Mme. Bouilleboeuf's gardener's brother."
"Ah, well!" my aunt would say, calm again but slightly flushed still;
"and the boy told me that you had passed a man you didn't know at all!"
After which I would be warned to be more careful of what I said, and not
to upset my aunt so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known
in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to
see a dog go by which she 'didn't know at all' she would think about it
incessantly, devoting to the solution of the incomprehensible problem
all her inductive talent and her leisure hours.
"That will be Mme. Sazerat's dog," Françoise would suggest, without any
real conviction, but in the hope of peace, and so that my aunt should
not 'split her head.'
"As if I didn't know Mme. Sazerat's dog!"--for my aunt's critical mind
would not so easily admit any fresh fact.
"Ah, but that will be the new dog M. Galopin has brought her from
Lisieux."
"Oh, if that's what it is!"
"It seems, it's a most engaging animal," Françoise would go on, having
got the story from Théodore, "as clever as a Christian, always in a good
temper, always friendly, always everything that's nice. It's not often
you see an animal so well-behaved at that age. Mme. Octave, it's high
time I left you; I can't afford to stay here amusing myself; look, it's
nearly ten o'clock and my fire not lighted yet, and I've still to dress
the asparagus."
"What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular disease of asparagus
you have got this year: you will make our Parisians sick of it."
"No, no, Madame Octave, they like it well enough. They'll be coming back
from church soon as hungry as hunters, and they won't eat it out of the
back of their spoons, you'll see."
"Church! why, they must be there now; you'd better not lose any time. Go
and look after your luncheon."
While my aunt gossiped on in this way with Françoise I would have
accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved it: how clearly I can see it
still, our church at Combray! The old porch by which we went in, black,
and full of holes as a cullender, was worn out of shape and deeply
furrowed at the sides (as also was the holy water stoup to which it led
us) just as if the gentle grazing touch of the cloaks of peasant-women
going into the church, and of their fingers dipping into the water, had
managed by agelong repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress
itself on the stone, to carve ruts in it like those made by cart-wheels
upon stone gate-posts against which they are driven every day. Its
memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray,
who were buried there, furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual
pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time
had softened and sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey
and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky,
frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning
the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their
limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription,
bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed
characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest
were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant
as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside
you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was
filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a
playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between
earth and heaven; and in the blue light of its slanting shadow, on
weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those
rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more
luxurious with the sun shewing off all its rich furnishings, seemed to
have almost a habitable air, like the hall--all sculptured stone and
painted glass--of some mediaeval mansion), you might see Mme. Sazerat
kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly
corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker's
and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a mountain of rosy
snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen the
window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like
a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illumined
by a sunrise--the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of the
altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for
a moment by a light shining from outside and shortly to be extinguished
than painted and permanently fastened on the stone. And all of them
were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity
sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare
brilliance the very cords of their lovely tapestry of glass. There
was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little
rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience
of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a
ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision
had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled
by turns, a rare and transient fire--the next instant it had taken on
all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a
flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of
the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were
along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was
following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped
in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the
deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on
some enormous breastplate; but beyond which could be distinguished,
dearer than all such treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which
could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in
which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the
straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came
down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness
of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime
in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded
carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.
Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in
which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the
features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of
Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one
another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch
of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the
yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have
acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding
atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in silk
and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the
top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing
upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong
rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these,
the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me
were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was
said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons
of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way
to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with
amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little
people's supernatural passage--all these things made of the church for
me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building
which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space--the name of the
fourth being Time--which had sailed the centuries with that old nave,
where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant,
hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness
of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where,
near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful
gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up
sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves
smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger
brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked
down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting
down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault,
ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his
sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little
daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been
bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when
the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the
golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried
itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."