“Yes, you may well say so, son, it is a pretty enough place is Méséglise;” she went on with a tinkling laugh, “but how did you ever come to hear tell of Méséglise?”
“How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-known place; people have told me about it—yes, over and over again,” he assured her with that criminal inexactitude of the informer who, whenever we attempt to form an impartial estimate of the importance that a thing which matters to us may have for other people, makes it impossible for us to succeed.
“I can tell you, it’s better down there, under the cherry-trees, than standing before the fire all day.”
She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since Eulalie’s death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had loved her as little in her life time 25as she loved every one whose cupboard was bare, who was dying of hunger, and after that came, like a good for nothing, thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put on airs”. It no longer pained her that Eulalie had so skilfully managed, Sunday after Sunday, to secure her “trifle” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never left off singing her praises.
“But it was at Combray, surely, that you used to be, with a cousin of Madame?” asked the young footman.
“Yes, with Mme. Octave—oh, a dear, good, holy woman, my poor friends, and a house where there was always enough and to spare, and all of the very best, a good woman, you may well say, who had no pity on the partridges, or the pheasants, or anything; you might turn up five to dinner or six, it was never the meat that was lacking, and of the first quality too, and white wine, and red wine, and everything you could wish.” (Françoise used the word “pity” in the sense given it by La Bruyère.) “It was she that paid the damages, always, even if the family stayed for months and years.” (This reflexion was not really a slur upon us, for Françoise belonged to an epoch when the word “damages” was not restricted to a legal use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell you, people didn’t go empty away from that house. As his reverence the Curé has told us, many’s the time, if there ever was a woman who could count on going straight before the Throne of God, it was she. Poor Madame, I can hear her saying now, in the little voice she had: ‘You know, Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the victuals, you may be quite sure. If you’d only seen her, she weighed no more 26than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She would never listen to a word I said, she would never send for the doctor. Ah, it wasn’t in that house that you’ld have to gobble down your dinner. She liked her servants to be fed properly. Here, it’s been just the same again to-day; we haven’t had time for so much as to break a crust of bread; everything goes like ducks and drakes.”
What annoyed her more than anything were the rusks of pulled bread that my father used to eat. She was convinced that he had them simply to give himself airs and to keep her “dancing”. “I can tell you frankly,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw the like.” He said it as if he had seen everything, and as if in him the range of a millennial experience extended over all countries and their customs, among which was not anywhere to be found a custom of eating pulled bread. “Yes, yes,” the butler muttered, “but that will all be changed; the men are going on strike in Canada, and the Minister told Monsieur the other evening that he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself entirely honest, but since he regarded all politicians as unsound the crime of peculation seemed to him less serious than the pettiest larceny. He did not even stop to ask himself whether he had heard this historic utterance aright, and was not struck by the improbability that such a thing would have been admitted by the guilty party himself to my father without my father’s immediately turning him out of the house. But the philosophy of Combray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that the strikes in Canada could have any repercussion on the use of pulled 27bread. “So long as the world goes round, look, there’ll be masters to keep us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of this theory of perpetual motion, for the last quarter of an hour my mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time as Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had been saying:
“What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at least two hours at their dinner.”
And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, “her” footman, the butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no thought of answering it, but rather like the first sounds of the instruments being tuned when the next part of a concert is just going to begin, and one knows that there will be only a few minutes more of interval. And so, when the peals were repeated and became more urgent, our servants began to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much time left and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal somewhat louder than the rest gave a collective sigh and went their several ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette outside the door, Françoise, after a string of reflexions on ourselves, such as: “They’ve got the jumps to-day, surely,” going up to put her things tidy in her attic, while the butler, having supplied himself first with note-paper from my bedroom, polished off the arrears of his private correspondence.
Despite the apparent stiffness of their butler, Françoise had been in a position, from the first, to inform me that the Guermantes occupied their mansion by virtue not of an immemorial right but of a quite recent tenancy, and that the garden over which it looked on the side that I did 28not know was quite small and just like all the gardens along the street; and I realised at length that there were not to be seen there pit and gallows or fortified mill, secret chamber, pillared dovecot, manorial bakehouse or tithe-barn, dungeon or drawbridge, or fixed bridge either for that matter, any more than toll-houses or pinnacles, charters, muniments, ramparts or commemorative mounds. But just as Elstir, when the bay of Balbec, losing its mystery, had become for me simply a portion, interchangeable with any other, of the total quantity of salt water distributed over the earth’s surface, had suddenly restored to it a personality of its own by telling me that it was the gulf of opal painted by Whistler in his “Harmonies in Blue and Silver”, so the name Guermantes had seen perish under the strokes of Françoise’s hammer the last of the dwellings that had issued from its syllables when one day an old friend of my father said to us, speaking of the Duchess: “She is the first lady in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; hers is the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-German.” No doubt the most exclusive drawing-room, the leading house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was little or nothing after all those other mansions of which in turn I had dreamed. And yet in this one too, (and it was to be the last of the series) there was something, however humble, quite apart from its material components, a secret differentiation.
And it became all the more essential that I should be able to explore in the drawing-room of Mme. de Guermantes, among her friends, the mystery of her name, since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage. Once before, indeed, in the church at Combray, 29she had appeared to me in the blinding flash of a transfiguration, with cheeks irreducible to, impenetrable by the colour of the name Guermantes and of afternoons on the banks of the Vivonne, taking the place of my shattered dream like a swan or willow into which has been changed a god or nymph, and which henceforward, subjected to natural laws, will glide over the water or be shaken by the wind. And yet, when that radiance had vanished, hardly had I lost sight of it before it formed itself again, like the green and rosy afterglow of sunset after
