In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [278]
Except on these rainy days, as we always arranged to go on our bicycles along the cliffs, or on an excursion inland, an hour or so before it was time to start I would go upstairs to make myself smart and would complain if Françoise had not laid out all the things that I wanted. Now even in Paris, at the first word of reproach she would proudly and angrily straighten a back which the years had begun to bend, she so humble, modest and charming when her self-esteem was flattered. As this was the mainspring of Françoise’s life, her satisfaction and her good humour were in direct ratio to the difficulty of the tasks imposed on her. Those which she had to perform at Balbec were so easy that she displayed an almost continual dissatisfaction which was suddenly multiplied a hundred-fold and combined with an ironic air of offended dignity when I complained, on my way down to join my friends, that my hat had not been brushed or my ties sorted. She who was capable of taking such endless pains and would think nothing of it, on my simply remarking that a coat was not in its proper place would not only boast of the care with which she had “shut it away sooner than let it go gathering the dust,” but, paying a formal tribute to her own labours, lamented that it was little enough of a holiday that she was getting at Balbec, and that we would not find another person in the whole world who would consent to put up with such treatment. “I can’t think how people can leave things lying about the way you do; you just try and get anyone else to find what you want in such a pell and mell. The devil himself couldn’t make head nor tail of it.” Or else she would adopt a regal mien, scorching me with her fiery glance, and preserve a silence that was broken as soon as she had fastened the door behind her and had set off down the corridor, which would then reverberate with utterances which I guessed to be abusive, though they remained as indistinct as those of characters in a play whose opening lines are spoken in the wings, before they appear on the stage. But even if nothing was missing and Françoise was in a good temper, still she made herself quite intolerable when I was getting ready to go out with my friends. For, drawing upon a store of jokes which, in my need to talk about these girls, I had told her at their expense, she took it upon herself to reveal to me what I should have known better than she if it had been accurate, which it never was, Françoise having misunderstood what she had heard. She had, like everyone else, her own peculiar character, which in no one resembles a straight highway, but surprises us with its strange, unavoidable windings which other people do not see and which it is painful to have to follow. Whenever I arrived at the stage of “Where is my hat?” or uttered the name of Andrée or Albertine, I was forced by Françoise to stray into endless and absurd sidetracks which greatly delayed my progress. So too when I ordered the cheese or salad sandwiches or sent out for the cakes which I would eat on the cliff with the girls, and which they “might very well have taken turns to provide, if they hadn’t been so close-fisted,” declared Françoise, to whose aid there came at such moments a whole heritage of atavistic peasant rapacity and coarseness, and for whom one would have said that the divided soul of her late enemy Eulalie had been reincarnated, more becomingly than in St Eloi, in the charming bodies of my friends of the little band. I listened to these accusations with a dull fury at finding myself brought to a standstill at one of those places beyond which the rustic and familiar path that was Françoise’s character became impassable, though fortunately never for very long. Then, my hat