In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [198]
Mamma had not even noticed M. Dieulafoy: everything that was not my grandmother no longer existed. I remember (and here I anticipate) that at the cemetery, where we saw her, like a supernatural apparition, tremulously approach the grave, her eyes seeming to gaze after a being that had taken wing and was already far away, my father having remarked to her: “Old Norpois came to the house and to the church and on here; he gave up a most important committee meeting to come; you ought really to say a word to him, he’d be very touched,” my mother, when the Ambassador bowed to her, could do no more than gently lower her face, which showed no sign of tears. A couple of days earlier—to anticipate still before returning to the bedside of the dying woman—while we were watching over her dead body, Françoise, who, not disbelieving entirely in ghosts, was terrified by the least sound, had said: “I believe that’s her.” But instead of fear, it was an ineffable sweetness that her words aroused in my mother, who would have dearly wished that the dead could return, so as to have her mother with her sometimes still.
To return now to those last hours, “You heard about the telegram her sisters sent us?” my grandfather asked the cousin.
“Yes, Beethoven, I’ve been told. It’s worth framing. Still, I’m not surprised.”
“And my poor wife was so fond of them, too,” said my grandfather, wiping away a tear. “We mustn’t blame them. They’re stark mad, both of them, as I’ve always said. What’s the matter now? Aren’t you going on with the oxygen?”
My mother spoke: “Oh, but then Mamma will be having trouble with her breathing again.”
The doctor reassured her: “Oh, no! The effect of the oxygen will last a good while yet. We can begin it again presently.”
It seemed to me that he would not have said this of a dying woman, that if this good effect was going to last it meant that it was still possible to do something to keep her alive. The hiss of the oxygen ceased for a few moments. But the happy plaint of her breathing still poured forth, light, troubled, unfinished, ceaselessly recommencing. Now and then it seemed that all was over; her breath stopped, whether owing to one of those transpositions to another octave that occur in the respiration of a sleeper, or else from a natural intermittence, an effect of anaesthesia, the progress of asphyxia, some failure of the heart. The doctor stooped to feel my grandmother’s pulse, but already, as if a tributary had come to irrigate the dried-up river-bed, a new chant had taken up the interrupted phrase, which resumed in another key with the same inexhaustible momentum. Who knows whether, without my grandmother’s even being conscious of them, countless happy and tender memories compressed by suffering were not escaping from her now, like those lighter gases which had long been compressed in the cylinders? It was as though everything that she had to tell us was pouring out, that it was us that she was addressing with this prolixity, this eagerness, this effusion. At the foot of the bed, convulsed by every gasp of this agony, not weeping but at moments drenched with tears, my mother stood with the unheeding desolation of a tree lashed by the rain and shaken by the wind. I was made to dry my eyes before I went up to kiss my grandmother.
“But I thought she could no longer see,” said my father.
“One can never be sure,” replied the doctor.
When my lips touched her face, my