In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [9]
His role in Françoise’s life had soon ceased to be indispensable. She had learned to stand in for him. Even when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a parcel or message, while seeming to pay no attention to him and merely pointing vaguely to an empty chair, Françoise so skilfully put to the best advantage the few moments that he spent in the kitchen while he waited for Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that he went away without having ineradicably engraved in his mind the conviction that, if we “did not have” any particular thing, it was because we had “no wish” for it. If she made such a point of other people’s knowing that we “had money”2 (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive articles, and said simply “have money,” “fetch water”), of their knowing us to be rich, it was not because wealth with nothing else besides, wealth without virtue, was in her eyes the supreme good; but virtue without wealth was not her ideal either. Wealth was for her, so to speak, a necessary condition failing which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so little between them that she had come in time to invest each with the other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to discover something edifying in wealth.
As soon as she had shut the window again, fairly quickly—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on her “every imaginable insult”—Françoise began with many groans and sighs to put the kitchen table straight.
“There’s some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my father’s valet. “I had a friend used to work there; he was their second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old pal but his brother-in-law, who did his time in the Army with one of the Baron de Guermantes’s grooms. ‘And after all, he ain’t my father,’ ”3 added the valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to hum the popular airs of the season, of peppering his conversation with all the latest witticisms.
Françoise, with the tired eyes of an ageing woman, eyes which moreover saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, perceived, not the witticism that underlay these words, but the fact that there must be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of the observation and had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a joker. She therefore smiled with an air of dazzled benevolence, as who should say: “Always the same, that Victor?” And she was genuinely pleased, knowing that listening to smart sayings of this sort was akin—if remotely—to those reputable social pleasures for which, in every class of society, people make haste to dress themselves in their best and run the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed the valet to be a friend after her own heart, for he never ceased to denounce with fierce indignation the appalling measures which the Republic was about to enforce against the clergy. Françoise had not yet learned that our cruellest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports which are liable to distress us, taking care not to give them any appearance of justification which might lessen our pain and perhaps give us some slight regard for an attitude which they make a point of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.
“The Duchess must be allianced with all that lot,” said Françoise, taking up the conversation again at the Guermantes of the Rue de la Chaise, as one resumes a piece of music at the andante. “I can’t recall who it was