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By Root 1783 0

sometimes large, in her person and attire as a whole, my love was not attached to any particular one of those changeable elements of flesh and fabric which replaced one another as day followed day, and which she could modify and renew almost entirely without tempering my agitation because beneath them, beneath the new collar and the strange cheek, I felt that it was still Mme de Guermantes. What I loved was the invisible person who set all this outward show in motion, the woman whose hostility so distressed me, whose approach threw me into a turmoil, whose life I should have liked to make my own, chasing away her friends. She might flaunt a blue feather or reveal an inflamed complexion, and her actions would still lose none of their importance for me.

I should not myself have felt that Mme de Guermantes was irritated at meeting me day after day, had I not learned it indirectly by reading it on the face, stiff with coldness, disapproval and pity, which Françoise wore when she was helping me to get ready for these morning walks. The moment I asked her for my outdoor things I felt a contrary wind arise in her worn and shrunken features. I made no attempt to win her confidence, for I knew that I should not succeed. She had a power, the nature of which I have never been able to fathom, for at once becoming aware of anything unpleasant that might happen to my parents and myself. Perhaps it was not a supernatural power, but could have been explained by sources of information that were peculiar to herself: as it may happen that the news which often reaches a savage tribe several days before the post has brought it to the European colony has really been transmitted to them not by telepathy but from hill-top to hill-top by beacon fires. Thus, in the particular instance of my morning walks, possibly Mme de Guermantes’s servants had heard their mistress say how tired she was of running into me every day without fail wherever she went, and had repeated her remarks to Françoise. My parents might, it is true, have attached some servant other than Françoise to my person, but I should have been no better off. Françoise was in a sense less of a servant than the others. In her way of feeling things, of being kind and compassionate, harsh and disdainful, shrewd and narrow-minded, of combining a white skin with red hands, she was still the village girl whose parents had had “a place of their own” but having come to grief had been obliged to put her into service. Her presence in our household was the country air, the social life of a farm of fifty years ago transported into our midst by a sort of holiday journey in reverse whereby it is the countryside that comes to visit the traveller. As the glass cases in a local museum are filled with specimens of the curious handiwork which the peasants still carve or embroider in certain parts of the country, so our flat in Paris was decorated with the words of Françoise, inspired by a traditional and local sentiment and governed by extremely ancient laws. And she could trace her way back as though by clues of coloured thread to the birds and cherry trees of her childhood, to the bed in which her mother had died, and which she still saw. But in spite of all this wealth of background, once she had come to Paris and had entered our service she had acquired—as, a fortiori, anyone else would have done in her place—the ideas, the system of interpretation used by the servants on the other floors, compensating for the respect which she was obliged to show to us by repeating the rude words that the cook on the fourth floor had used to her mistress, with a servile gratification so intense that, for the first time in our lives, feeling a sort of solidarity with the detestable occupant of the fourth floor flat, we said to ourselves that possibly we too were employers after all. This alteration in Françoise’s character was perhaps inevitable. Certain ways of life are so abnormal that they are bound to produce certain characteristic faults; such was the life led by the King at Versailles among his courtiers, a life