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By Root 1629 0

Combray!” she cried. And the almost singing tone in which she declaimed this invocation might, taken with the Arlesian purity of her features, have prompted a stranger to surmise that she was of Southern origin and that the lost homeland she was lamenting was no more than a land of adoption. If so, he would have been wrong, for it seems that there is no province that has not its own South-country; do we not indeed constantly meet Savoyards and Bretons in whose speech we find all those pleasing transpositions of longs and shorts that are characteristic of the Southerner? “Ah, Combray, when will I see you again, poor old place? When will I spend the whole blessed day among your hawthorns, under our own poor lilac trees, hearing the finches sing and the Vivonne making a little noise like someone whispering, instead of that wretched bell from our young master, who can never stay still for half an hour on end without having me run the length of that confounded corridor. And even then he makes out I don’t come quick enough; you’d need to hear the bell before he rung it, and if you’re a minute late, he flies into the most horrible rage. Ah, poor Combray! maybe I’ll only see you when I’m dead, when they drop me like a stone into a hole in the ground. And so, nevermore will I smell your lovely hawthorns, so white. But in the sleep of death I dare say I shall still hear those three peals of the bell which will already have driven me to damnation in this world.”

Her soliloquy was interrupted by the voice of the waistcoat-maker in the courtyard below, the same who had so pleased my grandmother once, long ago, when she had gone to pay a call on Mme de Villeparisis, and now occupied no less high a place in Françoise’s affections. Having raised his head when he heard our window open, he had already been trying for some time to attract his neighbour’s attention, in order to bid her good day. The coquetry of the young girl that Françoise had once been softened and refined for M. Jupien the querulous face of our old cook, dulled by age, ill-temper and the heat of the kitchen stove, and it was with a charming blend of reserve, familiarity and modesty that she bestowed a gracious salutation on the waistcoat-maker, but without making any audible response, for if she infringed Mamma’s injunctions by looking into the courtyard, she would never have dared to go the length of talking from the window, which would have been quite enough (according to her) to bring down on her “a whole chapter” from the Mistress. She pointed to the waiting carriage, as who should say: “A fine pair, eh!” though what she actually muttered was: “What an old rattletrap!”—but principally because she knew that he would be bound to answer, putting his hand to his lips so as to be audible without having to shout: “You could have one too if you liked, as good as they have and better, I dare say, only you don’t care for that sort of thing.”

And Françoise, after a modest, evasive and delighted signal, the meaning of which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know; simplicity’s the rule in this house,” shut the window again in case Mamma should come in. The “you” who might have had more horses than the Guermantes were ourselves, but Jupien was right in saying “you” since, except for a few purely personal self-gratifications (such as, when she coughed all day long without ceasing and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her cold, that of insisting, with an irritating little titter, that she had not got a cold), Françoise, like those plants that an animal to which they are wholly attached keeps alive with food which it catches, eats and digests for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily assimilable residue, lived with us in a symbiotic relationship; it was we who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take on ourselves the task of concocting those little sops to her vanity out of which was formed—with the addition of the recognised right to practise freely the cult of the midday dinner according to the traditional custom, which included