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By Root 1213 0

that we had our lunch an hour earlier on Saturdays, it was still more irresistibly funny that my father himself (wholeheartedly as she sympathised with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of the fact, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the other’s surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: “After all, it’s Saturday!” On reaching this point in the story, Françoise would pause to wipe the tears of merriment from her eyes, and then, to add to her own enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply for the visitor to whom the word “Saturday” had conveyed nothing. And so far from our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story was not yet long enough, and would rally her with: “Oh, but surely he said something else. There was more to it than that, the first time you told it.” My great-aunt herself would lay aside her needlework, and raise her head and look on at us over her glasses.

The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May we used to go out on Saturday evenings after dinner to the “Month of Mary” devotions.

As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on “the deplorable slovenliness of young people, which seems to be encouraged these days,” my mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for the church. It was in the “Month of Mary” that I remember having first fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at it except through my fingers, I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous adornment, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer and entirely veiling each corolla, that in following, in trying to mimic to myself the action of their efflorescence, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious.

M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us. He belonged to a good family, and had once been piano-teacher to my grandmother’s sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and inheriting some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. But with his intense prudishness he had given up coming so as not to be obliged to meet Swann, who had made what he called “a most unsuitable marriage, as seems to be the fashion these days.” My mother, on hearing that he composed, told him out of the kindness of her heart that, when she came to see him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would have liked nothing better, but he carried politeness and consideration for others to such scrupulous lengths, always putting himself in their place, that he was afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them, but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil’s house, Montjouvain, stood at the foot of a bushy hillock where I went