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By Root 1777 0

his sharp eye, which had been taking advantage of the shelter of his hands to observe whether my sympathy was sincere. He was crouched there as in the shadow of a confessional. He saw that I had noticed him and at once shut tight the lattice which he had left ajar. I met him again later, but never was any reference made by either of us to that minute. It was tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he was spying on me. With priests as with alienists, there is always an element of the examining magistrate. Besides, what friend is there, however dear to us, in whose past as in ours there has not been some such episode which we find it more convenient to believe that he must have forgotten?

The doctor gave my grandmother an injection of morphine, and to make her breathing less painful ordered cylinders of oxygen. My mother, the doctor, the nursing sister held these in their hands; as soon as one was exhausted another was put in its place. I had left the room for a few minutes. When I returned I found myself in the presence of a sort of miracle. Accompanied by an incessant low murmur, my grandmother seemed to be singing us a long, joyous song which filled the room, rapid and musical. I soon realised that it was scarcely less unconscious than, as purely mechanical as, the hoarse rattle that I had heard before leaving the room. Perhaps to a slight extent it reflected some improvement brought about by the morphine. Principally it was the result (the air not passing quite in the same way through the bronchial tubes) of a change in the register of her breathing. Released by the twofold action of the oxygen and the morphine, my grandmother’s breath no longer laboured, no longer whined, but, swift and light, glided like a skater towards the delicious fluid. Perhaps the breath, imperceptible as that of the wind in the hollow stem of a reed, was mingled in this song with some of those more human sighs which, released at the approach of death, suggest intimations of pain or happiness in those who have already ceased to feel, and came now to add a more melodious accent, but without changing its rhythm, to that long phrase which rose, soared still higher, then subsided, to spring up once more, from the alleviated chest, in pursuit of the oxygen. Then, having risen to so high a pitch, having been sustained with so much vigour, the chant, mingled with a murmur of supplication in the midst of ecstasy, seemed at times to stop altogether like a spring that has ceased to flow.

Françoise, in any great sorrow, felt the need, however futile—but did not possess the art, however simple—to give it expression. Realising that my grandmother was doomed, it was her own personal impressions that she felt impelled to communicate to us. And all that she could do was to repeat: “I feel quite upset,” in the same tone in which she would say, when she had taken too large a plateful of cabbage broth: “I’ve got a sort of weight on my stomach,” sensations both of which were more natural than she seemed to think. Though so feebly expressed, her grief was nevertheless very great, and was aggravated moreover by the fact that her daughter, detained at Combray (to which this young Parisian now disdainfully referred as “the back of beyond” and where she felt herself becoming a “country bumpkin”), would probably not be able to return in time for the funeral ceremony, which was certain, Françoise felt, to be a superb spectacle. Knowing that we were not inclined to be expansive, she had taken the precaution of bespeaking Jupien in advance for every evening that week. She knew that he would not be free at the time of the funeral. She was determined at least to “go over it all” with him on his return.

For several nights now my father, my grandfather and one of our cousins had been keeping vigil and no longer left the house. Their continuous devotion ended by assuming a mask of indifference, and their interminable enforced idleness around this deathbed made them indulge in the sort of small talk that is an inseparable accompaniment of prolonged confinement in a railway