In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [10]
“I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them that have their castle at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they must be kin to their cousin in Algiers, too.” (My mother and I had wondered for a long time who this cousin in Algiers could be until finally we discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of Angers. What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near. Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and especially its toponymy, was thickly strewn with errors.) “I meant to talk to their butler about it . . . What is it now they call him?” She broke off as though putting to herself a question of protocol, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course, it’s Antoine they call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s the one could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great pedant, you’d think they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no reply when you talk to him,” went on Françoise, who said “make reply” like Mme de Sévigné. “But,” she added, quite untruthfully, “so long as I know what’s boiling in my pot I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s. In any case it’s not Catholic. And what’s more, he’s not a courageous man.” (This criticism might have led one to suppose that Françoise had changed her mind about physical bravery which according to her, in Combray days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts. But it was not so. “Courageous” meant simply hard-working.) “They do say, too, that he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all you hear. The staff never stay long there because of the lodge; the porters are jealous and set the Duchess against them. But it’s safe to say that he’s a real idler, that Antoine, and his Antoinesse is no better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing the name “Antoine” with a feminine suffix that would designate the butler’s wife, was inspired, no doubt, in her act of word-formation by an unconscious memory of the words chanoine and chanoinesse. If so, she was not far wrong. There is still a street near Notre-Dame called Rue Chanoinesse, a name which must have been given to it (since it was inhabited only by canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise was in reality the contemporary. She proceeded, moreover, at once to furnish another example of this way of forming feminines, for she added: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the Duchess that has Guermantes Castle. And it’s she that is the Lady Mayoress down in those parts. That’s something.”
“I should think it is something,” said the footman with conviction, having failed to detect the irony.
“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why, for folk like them to be Mayor and Mayoress, it’s just thank you for nothing. Ah, if it was mine, that Guermantes Castle, you wouldn’t see me setting foot in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a family who’ve got something to go on with, like Monsieur and Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on in this wretched town sooner than get away down to Combray the moment they’re free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off retiring when they’ve got everything they want? Why wait till they’re dead? Ah, if only I had a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot