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
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,
will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive
quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh
for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister
to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house
uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless
stratagems. Many years later we discovered that, if we had been fed on
asparagus day after day throughout that whole season, it was because the
smell of the plants gave the poor kitchen-maid, who had to prepare them,
such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my
aunt's service.
Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one
of the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after
which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass
drew to an end, and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world,
something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that
Mme. Goupil, Mme. Percepied (all those, in fact, who a moment ago, when
I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, their eyes fixed
on their prayer-books; who, I might even have thought, had not seen
me come in, had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little
kneeling-desk which was preventing me from getting to my chair) began in
loud voices to discuss with us all manner of utterly mundane topics, as
though we were already outside in the Square, we saw, standing on the
sun-baked steps of the porch, dominating the many-coloured tumult of the
market, Legrandin himself, whom the husband of the lady we had seen with
him, on the previous occasion, was just going to introduce to the wife
of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face
shewed an extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a profound bow, with
a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a
position behind its starting-point, a gesture in which he must have
been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme. de Cambremer. This rapid
recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's
hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but
this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the
least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury
by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke
my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different
from the one whom we knew. The lady gave him some message for her
coachman, and while he was stepping down to her carriage the impression
of joy, timid and devout, which the introduction had stamped there,
still lingered on his face. Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled,
then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than
usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left,
in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he
abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he
were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile
we were coming out through the porch; we were passing close beside him;
he was too well bred to turn his head away; but he fixed his eyes, which
had suddenly changed to those of a seer, lost in the profundity of his
vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us,
and so had not to acknowledge our presence. His face emerged, still with
an air of innocence, from his straight and pliant coat, which looked
as though conscious of having been led astray, in spite of itself,
and plunged into surroundings of a detested splendour. And a spotted
necktie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in
front of Legrandin, like the standard of his proud isolation, of his
noble independence. Just as we reached the house my mother discovered
that we had forgotten the 'Saint-Honoré,' and asked my father to go
back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met
Legrandin, coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting
to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was
saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little
sign, which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids, and as
it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to
pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the
intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which
they had to find expression, he made that blue chink, which was set
apart for us, sparkle with all the animation of cordiality, which went
far beyond mere playfulness, and almost touched the border-line of
roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink
of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the
mysteries of complicity in a plot, and finally exalted his assurances
of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a
declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret
and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an
enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.
Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him
on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company,"
he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from
some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from
the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of
spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with
the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the
stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian
flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter
daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to
embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere
the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious
silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the
many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the
spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart,
for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the
closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."
The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought
still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused
to believe that he could have been impolite.
"You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite simply
dressed, and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added
that; in any event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally
rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing.
And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the
attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a
final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude
or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear
no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our
suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are
reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the
face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether
indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with
the result that such attitudes, and these alone are of importance in
indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.
I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. "There
is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence;
for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist, whom you will read
in time to come, claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow.
And see you this, my boy, there comes in all lives a time, towards which
you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of
light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the
stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what
the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence."
I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said,
it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed by the memory of a lady whom
I had seen recently for the first time; and thinking, now that I
knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local
aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I
summoned up all my courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you, by
any chance, know the lady--the ladies of Guermantes?" and I felt glad
because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over
it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an
objective existence in the world of spoken things.
But, at the sound of the word Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of
our friend's blue eyes a little brown dimple appear, as though they had
been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils,
reacting from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow.
His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been
stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and
smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a
good-looking martyr whose body bristles with arrows.
"No, I do not know them," he said, but instead of uttering so simple a
piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could
astonish me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have
befitted it, he recited it with a separate stress upon each word,
leaning forward, bowing his head, with at once the vehemence which a man
gives, so as to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though
the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some
strange accident of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding
himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation,
chooses to proclaim it aloud, so as to convince his hearers that the
confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, but is
easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation in question, in this
case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family, might very
well have been not forced upon, but actually designed by Legrandin
himself, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or
mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.
"No," he resumed, explaining by his words the tone in which they were
uttered. "No, I do not know them; I have never wished to know them; I
have always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart,
as you know, I am a bit of a Radical. People are always coming to me
about it, telling me I am mistaken in not going to Guermantes, that I
make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that's not the
sort of reputation that can frighten me; it's too true! In my heart
of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches,
books--two or three, pictures--rather more, perhaps, and the light of
the moon when the fresh breeze of youth (such as yours) wafts to my
nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes are not sharp
enough, now, to distinguish."