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By Root 1857 0

tradesmen and to come rushing—however little they might previously have sought to oblige—to take from my hands and not let me tire myself by carrying the smallest parcel. But at Combray Françoise had contracted also—and had brought with her to Paris—the habit of not being able to put up with any assistance in her work. The sight of anyone coming to help her seemed to her like a deadly insult, and servants had remained for weeks without receiving from her any response to their morning greeting, had even gone off on their holidays without her bidding them good-bye or their guessing her reason, which was simply and solely that they had offered to do a share of her work on some day when she had not been well. And at this moment when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise’s duties seemed to her peculiarly her own. She would not allow herself, as the official incumbent, to be done out of her role in the ritual of these gala days. And so her young footman, discarded by her, did not know what to do with himself, and not content with having copied the butler’s example and supplied himself with note-paper from my desk, had begun as well to borrow volumes of poetry from my bookshelves. He sat reading them for a good half of the day, out of admiration for the poets who had written them, but also in order, during the rest of his time, to sprinkle with quotations the letters which he wrote to his friends in his native village. True, his intention was to dazzle them. But since he was somewhat lacking in logic he had formed the notion that these poems, picked out at random from my shelves, were things of common currency to which it was customary to refer. So much so that in writing to these peasants whom he expected to impress, he interspersed his own reflexions with lines from Lamartine, just as he might have said “Who laughs last, laughs longest!” or merely “How are you keeping?”

Because of her acute pain my grandmother was given morphine. Unfortunately, if this relieved the pain it also increased the quantity of albumin. The blows which we aimed at the evil which had settled inside her were always wide of the mark, and it was she, it was her poor interposed body that had to bear them, without her ever uttering more than a faint groan by way of complaint. And the pain that we caused her found no compensation in any benefit that we were able to give her. The ferocious beast we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in grazing; we merely enraged it even more, hastening perhaps the moment when the captive would be devoured. On certain days when the discharge of albumin had been excessive Cottard, after some hesitation, stopped the morphine. During these brief moments in which he deliberated, in which the relative dangers of one and another course of treatment fought it out between them in his mind until he arrived at a decision, this man who was so insignificant and so commonplace had something of the greatness of a general who, vulgar in all things else, moves us by his decisiveness when the fate of the country is at stake and, after a moment’s reflexion, he decides upon what is from the military point of view the wisest course, and gives the order: “Advance eastwards.” Medically, however little hope there might be of bringing this attack of uraemia to an end, it was important not to put a strain on the kidneys. But, on the other hand, when my grandmother was given no morphine, her pain became unbearable; she would perpetually attempt a certain movement which it was difficult for her to perform without groaning: to a great extent, pain is a sort of need on the part of the organism to take cognisance of a new state which is troubling it, to adapt its sensibility to that state. We can discern this origin of pain in the case of certain discomforts which are not such for everyone. Into a room filled with pungent smoke two men of coarse fibre will come and attend to their business; a third, more sensitively constituted, will betray an incessant discomfort. His nostrils will continue to sniff anxiously the odour which he ought, one would