In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [6]
In the house in which we had now come to live, the great lady at the end of the courtyard was a Duchess, elegant and still young. She was, in fact, Mme de Guermantes and, thanks to Françoise, I soon came to know all about her household. For the Guermantes (to whom Françoise regularly alluded as the people “below,” or “downstairs”) were her constant preoccupation from the first thing in the morning when, as she did Mamma’s hair, casting a forbidden, irresistible, furtive glance down into the courtyard, she would say: “Look at that, now, a pair of holy Sisters: they’ll be for downstairs, surely”; or, “Oh! just look at the fine pheasants in the kitchen window. No need to ask where they’ve come from: the Duke’s been out with his gun!”—until the last thing at night when, if her ear, while she was putting out my night-things, caught the sound of a piano or a few notes of a song, she would conclude: “They’re having company down below; gay goings-on”; whereupon, in her symmetrical face, beneath her snow-white hair, a smile from her young days, sprightly but proper, would for a moment set each of her features in its place, arranging them in a prim and prepared order, as though for a quadrille.
But the moment in the life of the Guermantes which excited the keenest interest in Françoise, gave her the most complete satisfaction and at the same time the sharpest annoyance, was that at which, the carriage gates having been flung open, the Duchess stepped into her barouche. It was generally a little while after our servants had finished celebrating that sort of solemn passover which none might disturb, called their midday dinner, during which they were so far “taboo” that my father himself would not have taken the liberty of ringing for them, knowing moreover that none of them would have paid any more attention to the fifth peal than to the first, and that he would thus have committed this impropriety to no purpose, though not without detriment to himself. For Françoise (who, in her old age, lost no opportunity of standing upon her dignity) would not have failed to present him, for the rest of the day, with a face covered with the tiny red cuneiform hieroglyphs by which she made visible—though by no means legible—to the outer world the long tale of her grievances and the underlying causes of her displeasure. She would enlarge upon them, too, in a running “aside,” but not so that we could catch her words. She called this practice—which, she imagined, must be shattering for us, “mortifying,” “vexing,” as she put it—saying “low masses” to us the whole blessed day.
The last rites accomplished, Françoise, who was at one and the same time, as in the primitive church, the celebrant and one of the faithful, helped herself to a final glass, undid the napkin from her throat, folded it after wiping from her lips the vestiges of watered wine and coffee, slipped it into its ring, turned a doleful eye to thank “her” young footman who, to show his zeal in her service, was saying: “Come, ma’am, a few more grapes—they’re d’licious,” and went straight across to the window, which she flung open, protesting that it was too hot to breathe in “this wretched kitchen.” Dexterously casting, as she turned the latch and let in the fresh air, a glance of studied indifference into the courtyard below, she furtively ascertained that the Duchess was not yet ready to start, gazed for a moment with scornful and impassioned eyes at the waiting carriage, and, this meed of attention once paid to the things of the earth, raised them towards the heavens, whose purity she had already divined from the sweetness of the air and the warmth of the sun; and let them rest on a corner of the roof, at the place where, every spring, there came to nest, immediately over the chimney of my bedroom, a pair of pigeons like those she used to hear cooing from her kitchen at Combray.
“Ah! Combray,