She was an excellent judge of novels and poems, but on such topics she always relied, with a feminine humility, on the opinions of more competent authorities. There, in such wavering realms of caprice, she thought, a single individual’s taste was in no position to ascertain the truth.
But when it came to the things whose rules and principles her mother had taught her – how certain dishes should be prepared, how Beethoven’s sonatas should be played, how a guest should be made to feel welcome – she knew she possessed the correct idea of perfection and could discern the greater or lesser extent to which others approached it.
Besides, perfection in these three matters meant almost the same thing: a sort of simplicity of means, sobriety, and charm. She recoiled with horror from adding spices to a dish that did not absolutely require them, abusing the pedals by playing with affectation, or, while ‘receiving’, speaking too much about oneself or any departure from perfect naturalness. From the first bite, the first notes, an ordinary invitation, she claimed to know whether she was dealing with a good cook, a true musician, a well brought up woman.
‘She may have a lot more fingers to work with than I do, but she’s lacking in taste, to play that simple andante with so much emphasis.’ ‘She may be a very brilliant woman, full of good qualities, but it’s tactless to talk about herself that way.’ ‘She may well be a very knowledgeable cook, but she doesn’t know how make steak and potatoes.’ Steak and potatoes! The ideal competition piece, difficult precisely in its simplicity, a sort of Sonate Pathétique of cooking, the gastronomical equivalent of, in social life, the visit of a lady who comes to ask you for information about a maid, and who, in this simple act, can show the extent of her tact and education or lack thereof.
My grandfather was proud enough to want every dish to have been a success, but was too poor a judge of cooking to know when it had failed. He was willing to sometimes admit that it had, but he did so very rarely, and always as though it had happened purely by chance. My great-aunt’s always justified criticism, on the other hand, which implied that the cook had actually not known how to make the dish, could not help but be particularly intolerable to my grandfather. Often, to avoid an argument with him, my great-aunt, after a tiny nibble, did not give her opinion, from which we knew immediately that it was not favorable.
She kept quiet but we read a considered and un-shakeable disapproval in her gentle eyes, which had the power to make my grandfather furious. He begged her, his voice thick with irony, to favour us with her opinion, grew impatient with her silence, plied her with questions, lost his temper, but you could tell that she would be led to the stake rather than confess what my grandfather believed, that the cream in the dessert was not too sweet.
After lunch I took up my reading again at once; especially if the day was a bit hot, everyone went upstairs ‘to retire’ to their rooms, which allowed me to return to mine right away, up the little staircase of close-set stairs. The room was on the only upper floor, but low enough that a child could jump down from the projecting windows and find himself on the street.
I would go to close my window, unable to avoid the greetings of the gunsmith across the street who, under the pretext of lowering the awning, came out every day after lunch to smoke a cigarette in front of his door and say hello to the passers-by who sometimes stopped to chat. The theories of William Morris, so assiduously put into practice by Maple and the English decorators, dictate that a room is beautiful only on the condition that it contain only things that are useful to us, and furthermore that every one of these useful things, even an ordinary nail, be apparent, not concealed.
Reproductions of a few masterpieces are permitted on the naked walls of these sanitary chambers, above the brass and completely uncovered bed. Judged by these aesthetic principles, my room was not beautiful in the least, because it was full of things which could serve no purpose at all and which modestly concealed whatever objects did serve a purpose, to the point of making them extremely hard to use. But it was precisely those useless things, there not for my convenience but rather seemingly for their own pleasure, which gave the room beauty in my eyes.
Those high white curtains concealing from view the bed that was set back as though nestled in a shrine; the marceline comforters, floral bedspreads, embroidered coverlets, and batiste pillowcases strewn across the bed, under which it disappeared during the day, like an altar in the Month of the Virgin Mary under festoons and flowers, and which, in the evening, so that I could go to sleep, I would carefully put on an armchair where they agreed to spend the night; next to the bed, the trinity of a glass with blue designs on it, a matching sugar bowl, and the carafe (always empty, since the day after my arrival, on the orders of my aunt, who was afraid of seeing me ‘spill’), like instruments of worship – almost as sacred as the precious orange-flower liqueur placed near them in a glass vial – which I would have no more thought of profaning, or even thought myself able to use for my own personal needs, than if they had been consecrated pyxes, but which I contemplated at great length before getting undressed, afraid to knock them over with a clumsy movement; the little crocheted stoles which threw over the backs of the armchairs a cloak of white roses that must not have lacked thorns too, because every time I had finished reading and wanted to get up I discovered that I was caught fast on their little hooks; the glass bell under which, isolated from vulgar touch, the clock gossiped in private to seashells brought from far away and an old sentimental flower, but which was so heavy that when the clock stopped no one but the clockmaker would have been foolhardy enough to try to wind it up again; the white guipure-lace cloth which, thrown like an altar-cloth over a chest of drawers adorned with two vases, a picture of the Savior, and a blessed palm, made that chest resemble a communion table (and this image received the finishing touch from a prie-dieu, tucked away there every day after the room had been ‘done’), but whose frayed edges were always getting caught in the cracks of the drawers and bringing their movement to a complete halt, so that I could never so much as get a handkerchief out without making the picture of the Savior, the holy vases, and the blessed palm fall over, all at the same time, and without stumbling and clutching the prie-dieu to steady myself; finally, the triple layers of light gauze curtains, heavy toile curtains, and heavier damask curtains, always smiling on me in their whiteness reminiscent of hawthorn, often glowing in the sunlight, but ultimately very annoying in their awkward, stubborn insistence on playing around the parallel wooden curtain rods and getting tangled up with each other and caught in the window whenever I wanted to open or close it, a second one always ready, whenever I managed to free the first, to take its place in the joints as perfectly designed to snatch it up as a real hawthorn bush would have been, or the nests of swallows who had taken it into their heads to settle there, so that the act of opening or closing my casement window, apparently so simple, was one I was never able to manage without the help of someone else from the house; – all these things, which not only were unable to answer a single one of my needs but produced obstacles (even if minor) to the satisfaction of those needs, and which obviously had never been put there for anyone’s use, filled the room with in some sense personal thoughts, with an atmosphere of idiosyncratic preference, as though they themselves had chosen to live there and it pleased them: the same feeling that trees give off in a clearing, or flowers along paths and by old stone walls.
These objects filled the room with a silent and multifarious life, with a
