In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [184]
When, thanks to the faultless ministrations of Françoise, my grandmother had been put to bed, she discovered that she could speak much more easily, the little rupture or obstruction of a blood-vessel which had produced the uraemia having apparently been quite slight. And at once she was anxious not to fail Mamma in her hour of need, to assist her in the most cruel moments through which she had yet to pass.
“Well, my child,” she began, taking my mother’s hand in one of hers, and keeping the other in front of her lips, in order thus to account for the slight difficulty which she still found in pronouncing certain words. “So this is all the pity you show your mother! You look as if you thought that indigestion was quite a pleasant thing!”
Then for the first time my mother’s eyes gazed passionately into those of my grandmother, not wishing to see the rest of her face, and she replied, beginning the list of those false promises which we swear but are unable to keep:
“Mamma, you’ll soon be quite well again, your daughter will see to that.”
And gathering up all her most ardent love, all her determination that her mother should recover, she entrusted them to a kiss which she accompanied with her whole mind, with her whole being until it flowered upon her lips, and bent down to lay it humbly, reverently, on the beloved forehead.
My grandmother complained of a sort of alluvial deposit of bedclothes which kept gathering all the time in the same place, over her left leg, and which she could never manage to lift off. But she did not realise that she was herself the cause of this (so that day after day she accused Françoise unjustly of not “doing” her bed properly). By a convulsive movement she kept flinging to that side the whole flood of those billowing blankets of fine wool, which gathered there like the sand in a bay which is very soon transformed into a beach (unless a breakwater is built) by the successive deposits of the tide.
My mother and I (whose mendacity was exposed before we spoke by the obnoxious perspicaciousness of Françoise) would not even admit that my grandmother was seriously ill, as though such an admission might give pleasure to her enemies (not that she had any) and it was more loving to feel that she was not so bad as all that, in short from the same instinctive sentiment which had led me to suppose that Andrée pitied Albertine too much to be really fond of her. The same individual phenomena are reproduced in the mass, in great crises. In a war, the man who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as doomed, pities it, sees everything in the blackest colours.
Françoise was infinitely helpful to us owing to her faculty of doing without sleep, of performing the most arduous tasks. And if, when she had gone to bed after several nights spent in the sickroom, we were obliged to call her a quarter of an hour after she had fallen asleep, she was so happy to be able to perform painful duties as if they had been the simplest things in the world that, far from baulking, she would show signs of satisfaction tinged with modesty. Only when the time came for mass, or for breakfast, even if my grandmother had been in her death throes, Françoise would have slipped away in order not to be late. She neither could nor would let her place be taken by her young footman. It was true that she had brought from Combray an extremely exalted idea of everyone’s duty towards ourselves; she would not have tolerated that any of our servants should “fail” us. This doctrine had made her so noble, so imperious, so efficient an instructor that we had never had in our house any servants, however corrupt, who had not speedily modified and purified their conception of life so far as to refuse to touch the usual commissions from