• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1774 0

very best—a good woman, and no mistake, who didn’t spare the partridges, or the pheasants, or anything. You might turn up five to dinner or six, it was never the meat that was lacking, and of the first quality too, and white wine, and red wine, and everything you could wish.” (Françoise used the word “spare” in the same sense as La Bruyère.)4 “It was she that always paid the damages, even if the family stayed for months and years.” (This reflexion was not really meant as a slur upon us, for Françoise belonged to an epoch when the word “damages” was not restricted to a legal use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell you people didn’t go away empty from that house. As his reverence the Curé impressed on us many’s the time, if there ever was a woman who could count on going straight before the Throne of God, it was her. Poor Madame, I can still hear her saying in that faint little voice of hers: ‘You know, Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the victuals, you may be quite sure. If you’d only seen her, she weighed no more than a bag of cherries; there wasn’t that much of her. She would never listen to a word I said, she’d never send for the doctor. Ah, it wasn’t in that house that you’d have to gobble down your dinner. She liked her servants to be fed properly. Here, it’s been just the same again today; we’ve hardly had time for a snack. Everything has to be done on the run.”

What exasperated her more than anything were the slices of thin toast that my father used to eat. She was convinced that he indulged in them simply to give himself airs and to keep her “dancing.” “I can tell you frankly,” the young footman assured her, “that I never saw the like.” He said this as if he had seen everything, and as if for him the range of an inexhaustible experience extended over all countries and their customs, among which was nowhere to be found the custom of eating slices of toast. “Yes, yes,” the butler muttered, “but that may all be changed; the workers are going on strike in Canada, and the Minister told Monsieur the other evening that he’s clearing two hundred thousand francs out of it.” There was no note of censure in his tone, not that he was not himself entirely honest, but since he regarded all politicians as shady, the crime of peculation seemed to him less serious than the pettiest larceny. He did not even stop to ask himself whether he had heard this historic utterance aright, and seemed not to have been struck by the improbability that such a thing should have been said by the guilty party himself to my father without my father’s immediately turning him out of the house. But the philosophy of Combray made it impossible for Françoise to expect that the strikes in Canada could have any repercussion on the consumption of toast. “Ah, well, as long as the world goes round, there’ll be masters to keep us on the trot, and servants to do their bidding.” In disproof of this theory of perpetual trotting, for the last quarter of an hour my mother (who probably did not employ the same measures of time as Françoise in reckoning the duration of the latter’s dinner) had been saying: “What on earth can they be doing? They’ve been at table for at least two hours.” And she rang timidly three or four times. Françoise, “her” footman and the butler heard the bell ring, not as a summons to themselves, and with no thought of answering it, but rather as the first sounds of the instruments being tuned when the next part of a concert will soon begin, and one knows that there will be only a few minutes more of interval. And so, when the peals were repeated and became more urgent, our servants began to pay attention, and, judging that they had not much time left and that the resumption of work was at hand, at a peal somewhat louder than the rest gave a collective sigh and went their several ways, the footman slipping downstairs to smoke a cigarette outside the door, Françoise, after a string of reflexions on ourselves, such as: “They’ve got the jumps today