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By Root 1741 0

merely Comte de Nassau. He had married, some months later, the beautiful daughter of another Luxembourg princess, extremely rich because she was the only daughter of a prince who was the proprietor of an immense flour-milling business. Whereupon the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who had no children of his own and was devoted to his nephew Nassau, had obtained parliamentary approval for declaring the young man his heir. As with all marriages of this nature, the origin of the bride’s fortune was the obstacle, as it was also the efficient cause. I remembered this Comte de Nassau as one of the most striking young men I had ever met, already devoured, at that time, by a dark and blazing passion for his betrothed. I was deeply touched by the letters which he wrote to me regularly during my grandmother’s illness, and Mamma herself, in her emotion, quoted sadly one of her mother’s expressions: “Sévigné would not have put it better.”

On the sixth day Mamma, yielding to my grandmother’s entreaties, left her for a little and pretended to go and lie down. I should have liked (so that Grandmamma should go to sleep) Françoise to stay quietly at her bedside. In spite of my supplications, she got up and left the room. She was genuinely devoted to my grandmother, and with her perspicacity and her natural pessimism she regarded her as doomed. She would therefore have liked to give her every possible care and attention. But word had just come that an electrician had arrived, a veteran member of his firm, the head of which was his brother-in-law, highly esteemed throughout the building, where he had been coming for many years, and especially by Jupien. This man had been sent for before my grandmother’s illness. It seemed to me that he could have been sent away again, or asked to wait. But Françoise’s code of manners would not permit this; it would have been to show a lack of courtesy towards this excellent man; my grandmother’s condition ceased at once to matter. When, after waiting a quarter of an hour, I lost patience and went to look for her in the kitchen, I found her chatting to him on the landing of the back staircase, the door of which stood open, a device which had the advantage, should any of us come on the scene, of letting it be thought that they were just saying good-bye, but had also the drawback of sending a terrible draught through the house. Françoise tore herself from the workman, not without turning to shout down after him various greetings, forgotten in her haste, to his wife and his brother-in-law. This concern, characteristic of Combray, not to be found wanting in politeness was one which Françoise extended even to foreign policy. People foolishly imagine that the broad generalities of social phenomena afford an excellent opportunity to penetrate further into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to realise that it is by plumbing the depths of a single personality that they might have a chance of understanding those phenomena. Françoise had told the gardener at Combray over and over again that war was the most senseless of crimes, that life was the only thing that mattered. Yet, when the Russo-Japanese war broke out, she was quite ashamed, vis-à-vis the Tsar, that we had not gone to war to help the “poor Russians,” “since,” she reminded us, “we’re allianced to them.” She felt this abstention to be discourteous to Nicholas II, who had always “said such nice things about us”; it was a corollary of the same code which would have prevented her from refusing a glass of brandy from Jupien, knowing that it would “upset” her digestion, and which caused her, with my grandmother lying at death’s door, to feel that, by failing to go in person to make her apologies to this trusty electrician who had been put to so much trouble, she would have been committing the same discourtesy of which she considered France guilty in remaining neutral between Russia and Japan.

Luckily, we were soon rid of Françoise’s daughter, who was obliged to be away for some weeks. To the regular stock of advice which people at Combray gave to the family