In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [178]
“Oh, dear, if you’re going to meet your friends I ought to have put on another cape. I look rather wretched in this one.”
I was startled to see her so flushed, and supposed that having begun by making herself late she had had to hurry over her dressing. When we left the cab at the corner of the Avenue Gabriel, in the Champs-Elysées, I saw my grandmother turn away without a word and make for the little old pavilion with its green trellis at the door of which I had once waited for Françoise. The same park-keeper who had been there then was still there beside the “Marquise” as, following my grandmother who, doubtless because she was feeling sick, had her hand in front of her mouth, I climbed the steps of the little rustic theatre erected there in the middle of the gardens. At the entrance, as in those travelling circuses where the clown, dressed for the ring and smothered in flour, stands at the door and takes the money himself for the seats, the “Marquise,” at the receipt of custom, was still in her place with her huge, irregular face smeared with coarse paint and her little bonnet of red flowers and black lace surmounting her auburn wig. But I do not think she recognised me. The park-keeper, abandoning the supervision of the greenery, with the colour of which his uniform had been designed to harmonise, was sitting beside her chatting.
“So you’re still here,” he was saying. “You don’t think of retiring?”
“And why should I retire, Monsieur? Will you tell me where I should be better off than here, where I’d be more comfy and snug? And then there’s all the coming and going, plenty of distraction. My little Paris, I call it; my customers keep me in touch with everything that’s going on. Just to give you an example, there’s one of them went out not five minutes ago; he’s a judge, a proper high-up. Well!” she exclaimed heatedly, as though prepared to maintain the truth of this assertion by violence, should the agent of civic authority show any sign of challenging its accuracy, “for the last eight years, do you hear me, every blessed day, regular on the stroke of three he comes here, always polite, never saying one word louder than another, never making any mess; and he stays half an hour and more to read his papers while seeing to his little needs. There was one day he didn’t come. I never noticed it at the time, but that evening, all of a sudden I says to myself: ‘Why, that gentleman never came today; perhaps he’s dead!’ And I came over all queer, seeing as how I get quite fond of people when they behave nicely. And so I was very glad when I saw him come in again next day, and I said to him: ‘I hope nothing happened to you yesterday, sir?’ And he told me nothing had happened to him, it was his wife that had died, and it had given him such a turn he hadn’t been able to come. He looked sad, of course—well, you know, people who’ve been married five-and-twenty years—but he seemed pleased, all the same, to be back here. You could see that all his little habits had been quite upset. I did what I could to cheer him up. I said to him: ‘You mustn’t let go of things, sir. Just keep coming here the same as before, it will be a little distraction for you in your sorrow.’ ”
The “Marquise” resumed a gentler tone, for she had observed that the guardian of groves and lawns was listening to her good-naturedly and with no thought of contradiction, keeping harmlessly in its scabbard a sword which looked more like a gardening implement or some horticultural emblem.
“And besides,” she went on, “I choose my customers, I don’t let everyone into my parlours, as I call them. Doesn’t it just look like a parlour with all my flowers? Such friendly customers I have; there’s always someone or other brings me a spray