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By Root 1253 0

’m very low, very low; nearing the end, I’m afraid” had replied: “Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while yet,” all alike might be certain that her doors would never be opened to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look of consternation on my aunt’s face whenever she saw from her bed any of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit looking as if they were coming to see her, or whenever she heard her door-bell ring, she would laugh far more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt’s devices (which never failed) for having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture when they had to turn back without having seen her, and would be filled with secret admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior to all these people since she did not wish to receive them. In short, my aunt demanded that whoever came to see her must at one and the same time approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of ultimate recovery.

In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in a minute: “The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!,” twenty times Eulalie would retort: “Knowing your illness as you do, Mme Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme Sazerin said to me only yesterday.” For one of Eulalie’s most rooted beliefs, and one that the formidable number of rebuttals which experience had brought her was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme Sazerat’s name was really Mme Sazerin.

“I do not ask to live to a hundred,” my aunt would say, for she preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.

And since besides this Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place regularly every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent them, were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those days in a state of expectation, agreeable enough to begin with, but swiftly changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie happened to be a little late. For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never stop looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of her symptoms in turn. Eulalie’s ring, if it sounded from the front door at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of nothing else but this visit, and the moment our lunch was ended Françoise would be impatient for us to leave the dining-room so that she might go upstairs to “occupy” my aunt. But—especially after the fine weather had definitely set in at Combray—the proud hour of noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonorous crown, would long have echoed about our table, beside the blessed bread which too had come in, after church, in its familiar way, and we would still be seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed down by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal. For upon the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and biscuits, which she no longer even bothered to announce, Françoise would add—as the labour of fields and orchards, the harvest of the tides, the luck of the markets, the kindness of neighbours, and her own genius might provide, so that our bill of fare, like the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals in the thirteenth century, reflected to some extent the rhythm of the seasons and the incidents of daily life—a brill because the fish-woman had guaranteed its freshness, a turkey because she had seen a beauty in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin, cardoons with marrow because she had never done them for us in that way before, a roast leg of mutton because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to “settle down” in the seven hours before dinner, spinach by way of a change, apricots because they were still hard to get, gooseberries because in another