as far as possible by always drawing her attention to the brighter side of
things. But my father had begun to speak.
"I should like to take advantage," he said, "of the whole family's being 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
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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 ex-
cited 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 neigh-
bourhood, 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 vir-
tue, known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being
out for amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my fath-
er 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 him-
self, 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
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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 mo-
ment, 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 im-
perceptible 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 dis-
guise 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 be-
side 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 waf-
ted 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
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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 per-
fume 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 be-
neath 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 ap-
pearance 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,
116
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 un-
moved, 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 curios-
ity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read the clinical ac-
count 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 stim-
ulus 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
Bet 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
117
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 oth-
er 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 al-
lowing 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 ana-
tomy 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 unfalter-
ing 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
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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 Cambre-
mer. 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 mes-
sage 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 happi-
ness. 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 escort-
ing 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
119
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 sub-
tilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a
hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of com-
plicity 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 be-
gin 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 glori-
ous 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 wirier, 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 re-
fused 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 un-
certainty 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
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evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this de-
tached 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 still-
room 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 aris-
tocracy, 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 exist-
ence 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 pu-
pils, 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 acci-
dent of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding himself
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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, agree-
able, 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