In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [248]
was always entirely pleasing to my mother. Not that, humanly speaking, she made the slightest distinction between one person and another, and if Françoise was ever in sorrow or in pain she was comforted and tended by Mamma with the same devotion as her best friend. But my mother was too much my grandfather’s daughter not to accept, in social matters, the rule of caste. People at Combray might have kind hearts and sensitive natures, might have adopted the noblest theories of human equality, yet my mother, when a footman showed signs of forgetting his place, began to say “you” and gradually slipped out of the habit of addressing me in the third person, was moved by these presumptions to the same wrath that breaks out in Saint-Simon’s Memoirs whenever a nobleman who is not entitled to it seizes a pretext for assuming officially the style of “Highness,” or for not paying dukes the deference he owes to them and is gradually beginning to lay aside. There was a “Combray spirit” so deep-rooted that it would take centuries of natural kindness (my mother’s was boundless) and egalitarian conviction to succeed in dissolving it. I cannot swear that in my mother certain particles of this spirit had not remained insoluble. She would have been as reluctant to shake hands with a footman as she was ready to give him ten francs (which for that matter gave him far more pleasure). To her, whether she admitted it or not, masters were masters and servants were the people who fed in the kitchen. When she saw the driver of a motor-car dining with me in the restaurant, she was not altogether pleased, and said to me: “It seems to me you might have a more suitable friend than a mechanic,” as she might have said, had it been a question of my marriage: “You might have found somebody better than that.” This particular chauffeur (fortunately I never dreamed of inviting him to dinner) had come to tell me that the motor-car company which had sent him to Balbec for the season had ordered him to return to Paris on the following day. This excuse, especially as the chauffeur was charming and expressed himself so simply that one would always have taken anything he said for gospel, seemed to us to be most probably true. It was only half so. There was as a matter of fact no more work for him at Balbec. And in any case the company, being only half convinced of the veracity of the young evangelist, bowed over his wheel of consecration, was anxious that he should return to Paris as soon as possible. And indeed if the young apostle wrought a miracle in multiplying his mileage when he was calculating it for M. de Charlus, when, on the other hand, it was a matter of rendering his account to the company, he divided what he had earned by six. In consequence of which the company, coming to the conclusion either that nobody wanted a car now at Balbec, which, so late in the season, was not improbable, or that it was being robbed, decided that, upon either hypothesis, the best thing was to recall him to Paris, not that there was very much work for him there. What the chauffeur wished was to avoid, if possible, the dead season. I have said—though I was unaware of this at the time, and the knowledge of it would have saved me much unhappiness—that he was on very friendly terms with Morel, although they showed no sign even of knowing each other in front of other people. From the day on which he was recalled, without knowing as yet that he had a means of avoiding departure, we were obliged to content ourselves for our excursions with hiring a carriage, or sometimes, as an amusement for Albertine and because she was fond of riding, a pair of saddle-horses. The carriages were unsatisfactory. “What a rattle-trap,” Albertine would say. I would, in any case, often have preferred to be alone in it. Without being ready to fix a date, I longed to put an end to this existence which I blamed for making me renounce not so much work as pleasure. It sometimes happened too, however, that the habits which bound me were suddenly abolished, generally when some former self, full of the desire to