In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [72]
When I say that, apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my aunt’s daily routine never underwent any variation, I do not include those which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical form, did no more than print a sort of uniform pattern upon the greater uniformity of her life. Thus, for instance, every Saturday, as Françoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin, the whole household would have to have lunch an hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly exception to her general habits, that she clung to it as much as to the rest. She was so well “routined” to it, as Françoise would say, that if, on a Saturday, she had had to wait for her lunch until the regular hour, it would have “upset” her as much as if on an ordinary day she had had to put her lunch forward to its Saturday hour. Incidentally this acceleration of lunch gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when ordinarily there is still an hour to be lived through before the meal-time relaxation, we knew that in a few seconds we should see the arrival of premature endives, a gratuitous omelette, an unmerited beefsteak. The recurrence of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those minor events, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national tie and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided the ready-made kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of mind. Early in the morning, before we were dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of proving the strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another good-humouredly, cordially, patriotically, “Hurry up, there’s no time to waste; don’t forget it’s Saturday!” while my aunt, conferring with Françoise and reflecting that the day would be even longer than usual, would say, “You might cook them a nice bit of veal, seeing that it’s Saturday.” If, at half-past ten, someone absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, “I say, an hour-and-a-half still before lunch,” everyone else would be delighted to be able to retort at once: “Why, what are you thinking about? Have you forgotten that it’s Saturday?” And a quarter of an hour later we would still be laughing about it and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Léonie of this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, “What, only two o’clock!” on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as a rule met no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for the midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks of the bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and passed unaccompanied across the vacant sky, where only a few loitering clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus: “Why, you’re forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it’s Saturday.”
The surprise of a “barbarian” (for so we termed everyone who was not acquainted with Saturday’s special customs) who had called at eleven o’clock to speak to my father and had found us at table, was an event which caused Françoise as much merriment as anything that had ever happened in her life. But if she found it amusing that the nonplussed visitor should not have known beforehand