In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [40]
“But that must be M. Pupin’s daughter,” Françoise would say, preferring to stick to an immediate explanation, since she had been twice already into Camus’s shop that morning.
“M. Pupin’s daughter! Oh, that’s a likely story, my poor Françoise. Do you think I wouldn’t have recognised M. Pupin’s daughter!”
“But I don’t mean the big one, Mme Octave; I mean the little lass, the one who goes to school at Jouy. It beseems I’ve seen her once already this morning.”
“Ah! that’s probably it,” my aunt would say. “She must have come over for the holidays. Yes, that’s it. No need to ask, she will have come over for the holidays. But then we shall soon see Mme Sazerat come along and ring her sister’s door-bell for lunch. That will be it! I saw the boy from Galopin’s go by with a tart. You’ll see that the tart was for Mme Goupil.”
“Once Mme Goupil has company, Mme Octave, you won’t have long to wait before you see all her folk going home to their lunch, for it’s not so early as it was,” Françoise would say, for she was anxious to return downstairs to look after our own meal, and was not sorry to leave my aunt with the prospect of such a diversion.
“Oh! not before midday,” my aunt would reply in a tone of resignation, darting an anxious glance at the clock, but furtively, so as not to let it be seen that she, who had renounced all earthly joys, yet found a keen satisfaction in learning that Mme Goupil was expecting company to lunch, though, alas, she must wait a little more than an hour still before enjoying the spectacle. “And it will come in the middle of my lunch!” she would murmur to herself. Her lunch was such a distraction in itself that she did not wish for any other at the same time. “I hope you won’t forget to give me my creamed eggs on one of the flat plates?” she would add. These were the only plates which had pictures on them, and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the caption on whichever one had been sent up to her that day. She would put on her spectacles and spell out: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp,” and smile, and say: “Very good, very good.”
“I would have gone across to Camus …” Françoise would hazard, seeing that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.
“No, no; it’s not worth while now; it’s certainly the Pupin girl. My poor Françoise, I’m sorry to have brought you upstairs for nothing.”
But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one “didn’t know from Adam” was as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and indeed no one could remember, on the various occasions when one of these startling apparitions had occurred in the Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square, exhaustive inquiries ever having failed to reduce the fabulous monster to the proportions of a person whom one “did know,” either personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to be Mme Sauton’s son back from military service, or the Abbé Perdreau’s niece home from her convent, or the Curé’s brother, a tax-collector at Châteaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holidays. They had on first appearance aroused the exciting thought that there might be in Combray people whom one “didn’t know from Adam,” simply because they had not been recognised or identified at once. And yet long beforehand Mme Sauton and the Curé had given warning that they expected their “strangers.” Whenever I went upstairs on returning home of an evening, to tell my aunt about our walk, if I was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the Pont-Vieux, a man whom my grandfather didn’t know: “A man grandfather didn’t know from Adam!” she would exclaim. “That’s a likely story.” None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news, would wish to have it cleared up, and so my grandfather would be summoned. “Who can it have been that you passed near the Pont-Vieux, uncle? A man you