Who cannot recall, as I can, the reading they did in the holidays, which one would conceal successively in all those hours of the day peaceful and inviolable enough to be able to afford it refuge. In the mornings, after returning from the park, when everyone had gone out for a walk, I would slip into the dining-room, where no one would be coming until the still distant hour for lunch except for the old, relatively silent Félicie, and where I would have for my sole companions, most respectful of reading, the painted plates hanging on the wall, the calendar from which the previous day’s page had been newly torn, the clock and the fire, which speak but without demanding that one answer them and whose quiet remarks are void of meaning and do not, unlike human speech, substitute a different meaning for that of the words you are reading. I would settle myself on a chair, near the small log fire of which, during lunch, my early rising uncle, the gardener, would say: ‘That doesn’t do any harm!
I can put up with a bit of fire; it was jolly cold in the vegetable garden at six o’clock I can assure you. And to think it’s only a week to Easter!’ Before lunch, which would, alas, put a stop to my reading, lay two whole hours. From time to time one heard the sound of the pump, from which the water was about to flow, causing one to look up and gaze at it through the closed window, close by on the little garden’s solitary path that edged its beds of pansies with bricks and half-moons of pottery: pansies gathered so it seemed in those too beautiful skies, those versicoloured skies that were as if reflected from the stained-glass of the church sometimes to be seen between the roofs of the village, the sad skies that appeared before a storm, or afterwards, too late, when the day was about to end. Unfortunately, the cook would come in well ahead of time to set the table; if only she had set it without speaking! But she felt it her duty to say: ‘You’re not comfortable like that; supposing I move the table nearer?’
And merely to reply: ‘No, thank you,’ one had to stop one’s voice dead and bring it back from far away, that voice which, inside one’s lips, had been noiselessly repeating, fluently, all the words one’s eyes had been reading; one had to stop it, to bring it out, and, in order to say an appropriate ‘No, thank you,’ to give it a semblance of ordinary life, the intonation of a reply, which it had lost.
Time was passing; often there would start to arrive in the dining-room, long before lunch, those who had felt tired and had cut short their walk, had ‘taken the Méréglise way’ or those who had not gone out that morning, having some ‘writing to do’. They would say, admittedly: ‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ but would at once start to approach the fire, to look at the time, to declare that lunch would not be unwelcome. Whoever had ‘stayed in to write’ was met with a particular deference and they would say to him or her: ‘You’ve been keeping up your little correspondence’ with a smile into which there entered respect, mystery, ribaldry and circumspection, as if this ‘little correspondence’ were at once a state secret, a prerogative, an amorous liaison and an indisposition. Some could wait no longer and would take their places at the table, ahead of time. This was heartbreaking because it would set a bad example to the other arrivals, would make them think it was already midday and bring from my parents all too soon the fatal words: ‘Come on, close your book, we’re going to have lunch.’
Everything was ready, the places were fully laid on the table-cloth, where all that was missing was what was only brought in at the end of the meal, the glass device in which my uncle, the horticulturalist and cook, himself made the coffee at the table, tubular and complicated like some piece of physics apparatus that smelt good and in which it was most agreeable to watch the sudden ebullition rise into the glass dome and then leave its fragrant brown ash on the steamed-up sides; as well as the cream and the strawberries which this same uncle would mix, always in identical proportions, stopping precisely at the pink colour that he required, with the experience of a colourist and the instinctive foresight of a gourmand. How long lunch seemed to last!
My great-aunt did no more than sample the dishes so as to give her opinion with a quietness which would tolerate but not admit contradiction. Over a novel, or a poem, things she was an expert in, she always deferred, with a woman’s humility, to the opinion of those more competent. She believed that to be the fluctuating domain of caprice in which the preference of an individual is unable to establish the truth. But over things the rules and principles of which had been taught her by her mother, the way of cooking certain dishes, of playing Beethoven sonatas, or of entertaining graciously, she was sure she knew what a proper perfection was and could tell how close or not others had come to it. In these three things, what is more, perfection was almost the same: a sort of simplicity of means, of sobriety and of charm.
She rejected with horror the addition of seasonings to dishes that did not absolutely require them, that one should play affectedly or with too much pedal, that when ‘entertaining’ one should be other than perfectly natural or talk overmuch about oneself. From the very first mouthful, the first notes, a simple invitation, she would claim to know whether she had to deal with a good cook, a genuine musician, a woman who had been well brought up. ‘She may have many more fingers than I do, but she has no taste to play that very simple andante with so much emphasis.’ ‘She may be a very brilliant woman full of good qualities, but it is wanting in tact to talk about oneself in such circumstances.’
‘She may be a very knowledgeable cook, but she doesn’t know how to do a bifteck aux pommes,’ A bifteck aux pommes, the ideal competition piece, difficult by its very simplicity, a sort of Pathetic Sonata of cooking, a gastronomic equivalent of, in social life, the visit of the lady who has come to ask you to tell her about a servant yet who, in this simple act, is able to display, or to lack, so much tact and education.
Such was my grandfather’s amour propre that he would have liked all the dishes to be a success, but so ill-informed was he about cooking that he never knew when they had failed. He was quite willing to admit on occasions that they had, but very rarely and only on purely accidental grounds. My great-aunt’s always justified criticisms, implying on the contrary that the cook had not known how to make a certain dish, could not fail to seem especially intolerable to my grandfather.
Often, to avoid arguing with him, my great-aunt, after merely brushing it with her lips, would then withhold her opinion, which at once let us know that it was unfavourable. She remained silent, but in her kindly eyes we could read an unshakeable and meditated disapproval, which had the gift of driving my grandfather into a fury. He would beg her ironically to give her opinion, grow impatient at her silence, press her with questions, lose his temper, but one sensed that she would have accepted martyrdom rather than be made to confess what my grandfather believed: that the dessert had not been over-sweetened.
After lunch, my reading resumed straight away; especially if the day was at all warm, everyone withdrew upstairs into their bedrooms, which enabled me at once to gain my own, up the little flight of close-set stairs, on the solitary upper storey, so low that once astride the windowsill a child might have jumped down into the street. I would go to close my window without having been able to escape the greeting of the gunsmith opposite
