aunt's 'little jog-trot' never underwent any variation, I do not include
those variations which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical
form, did no more, really, than print a sort of uniform pattern upon
the greater uniformity of her life. So, for instance, every Saturday, as
Françoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin,
the whole household would have to have luncheon an hour earlier. And my
aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly exception to
her general habits, that she clung to it as much as to the rest. She
was so well 'routined' to it, as Françoise would say, that if, on a
Saturday, she had had to wait for her luncheon until the regular hour,
it would have 'upset' her as much as if she had had, on an ordinary
day, to put her luncheon forward to its Saturday time. Incidentally this
acceleration of luncheon gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual
character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when, ordinarily,
there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded,
we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives
make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an
omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday
was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost
civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a
kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation,
for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator
pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary
cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, before we were
dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of proving the
strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another good-humoredly,
cordially, patriotically, "Hurry up; there's no time to be lost; don't
forget, it's Saturday!" while my aunt, gossiping with Françoise, and
reflecting that the day would be even longer than usual, would say, "You
might cook them a nice bit of veal, seeing that it's Saturday." If, at
half-past ten, some one absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, "I
say, an hour-and-a-half still before luncheon," everyone else would
be in ecstasies over being able to retort at once: "Why, what are you
thinking about? Have you for-gotten that it's Saturday?" And a quarter
of an hour later we would still be laughing, and reminding ourselves to
go up and tell aunt Léonie about this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The
very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After luncheon the
sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the
zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late in starting for
our walk, said, "What, only two o'clock!" feeling the heavy throb go by
him of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as
a rule passed no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for the
midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks of the
bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and
so slipped unaccompanied into the vacant sky, where only a few loitering
clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus:
"Why, you're forgetting; we had luncheon an hour earlier; you know very
well it's Saturday."
The surprise of a 'barbarian' (for so we termed everyone who was not
acquainted with Saturday's special customs) who had called at eleven
o'clock to speak to my father, and had found us at table, was an event
which used to cause Françoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything
that had ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that the
nonplussed visitor should not have known, beforehand, that we had our
luncheon an hour earlier on Saturday, it was still more irresistibly
funny that my father himself (fully as she sympathised, from the bottom
of her heart, with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never
have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of so simple a
matter, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the
other's surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: "You see, it's
Saturday." On reaching this point in the story, Françoise would pause to
wipe the tears of merriment from her eyes, and then, to add to her own
enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply for
the visitor to whom the word 'Saturday' had conveyed nothing. And so far
from our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story
was not yet long enough, and would rally her with: "Oh, but surely he
said something else as well. There was more than that, the first time
you told it."
My great-aunt herself would lay aside her work, and raise her head and
look on at us over her glasses.
The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May
we used to go out on Saturday evenings after dinner to the 'Month of
Mary' devotions.
As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict
views on "the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to
be encouraged in these days," my mother would first see that there was
nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for
the church. It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember
having first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not
merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us
a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from
the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in
among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to
one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and
they were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark
leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train,
little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look
at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme
was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by
trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament
of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at
once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar,
a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so
unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of
stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a
white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate,
somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it
as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance
from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and
alive.
M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us.
He belonged to a good family, and had once been music-master to
my grandmother's sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and
inheriting some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of
Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. But with his intense
prudishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet
Swann, who had made what he called "a most unsuitable marriage, as
seems to be the fashion in these days." My mother, on hearing that he
'composed,' told him by way of a compliment that, when she came to see
him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would have liked
nothing better, but he carried politeness and consideration for others
to so fine a point, always putting himself in their place, that he was
afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out,
or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day
when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them,
but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil's house,
Montjouvain, stood on a site actually hollowed out from a steep hill
covered with shrubs, among which I took cover, I had found myself on a
level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from its
window. When a servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived,
I had seen M. Vinteuil run to the piano and lay out a sheet of music
so as to catch the eye. But as soon as they entered the room he had
snatched it away and hidden it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt, of
letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave
him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time
that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject
of his playing, he had hurriedly protested: "I cannot think who put that
on the piano; it is not the proper place for it at all," and had turned
the conversation aside to other topics, simply because those were of
less interest to himself.
His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her
somewhat boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to
restrain a smile when one saw the precautions her father used to take
for her health, with spare shawls always in readiness to wrap around
her shoulders. My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle,
delicate, almost timid expression which might often be caught flitting
across the face, dusted all over with freckles, of this otherwise stolid
child. When she had spoken, she would at once take her own words in the
sense in which her audience must have heard them, she would be alarmed
at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear
outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the
'good sort' that she was, the finer features of a young woman in tears.
When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before
the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of
almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed
that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour,
in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste
of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle.
Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless
silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like
the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was
quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I
was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed
to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging
insects now transmuted into flowers.
Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M. Vinteuil,
in the porch. Boys would be chevying one another in the Square, and he
would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the
big. If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she
had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and
more sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless,
schoolboyish utterance, which had, perhaps, made us think that she was
angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange
a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart
which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain.
As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and
stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, then,
instead of taking us home at once, my father, in his thirst for personal
distinction, would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my
mother's utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing
which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his
strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, which
began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and
to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of
civilisation, because every year, as we came down from Paris, we would
be warned to take special care, when we got to Combray, not to miss
the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would start
again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct, out of the lands of
Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest limit.
We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most
attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight,
copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases
of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its
beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was
a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which
endures for all time. I would by now be dragging my weary limbs, and
ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees seemed a
consolation which I could obtain only at the price of great suffering
and exhaustion, and not worthy of the effort. From gates far apart
the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up
an antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the
evenings, and it is in their custody (when the public gardens of Combray
were constructed on its site) that the Boulevard de la Gare must
have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their
alternate challenge and acceptance, I can see it again with all its
lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.
Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my
mother--"Where are we?" Utterly worn out by the walk but still proud of
her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least
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.