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By Root 1397 0

expression not of my anger but of the truth, though without wasting any time in order not to keep Albertine waiting) I addressed these cruel words to Françoise: “You are excellent,” I said to her in a honeyed voice, “you are kind, you have endless qualities, but you have never learned a single thing since the day you first came to Paris, either about ladies’ clothes or about how to pronounce words without making howlers.” And this reproach was particularly stupid, for those French words which we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only “howlers” made by Gaulish lips which mispronounced Latin or Saxon, our language being merely a defective pronunciation of several others. The genius of language in its living state, the future and past of French, that is what ought to have interested me in Françoise’s mistakes. Wasn’t “amender” for “mender” just as curious as those animals that survive from remote ages, such as the whale or the giraffe, and show us the states through which animal life has passed?

“And,” I went on, “since you haven’t managed to learn in all these years, you never will. But don’t let that distress you: it doesn’t prevent you from being a very good soul, and making spiced beef with jelly to perfection, and lots of other things as well. The hat that you think so simple is copied from a hat belonging to the Princesse de Guermantes which cost five hundred francs. In fact I mean to give Mlle Albertine an even finer one very soon.”

I knew that what would annoy Françoise more than anything was the thought of my spending money on people she disliked. She answered me in a few words which were made almost unintelligible by a sudden attack of breathlessness. When I discovered afterwards that she had a weak heart, how remorseful I felt that I had never denied myself the fierce and sterile pleasure of thus answering her back! Françoise detested Albertine, moreover, because, being poor, Albertine could not enhance what Françoise regarded as my superior position. She smiled benevolently whenever I was invited by Mme de Villeparisis. On the other hand, she was indignant that Albertine did not practise reciprocity. I found myself being obliged to invent fictitious presents from the latter, in the existence of which Françoise never for an instant believed. This want of reciprocity shocked her most of all in the matter of food. That Albertine should accept dinners from Mamma, when we were not invited to Mme Bontemps’s (who in any case spent half her time out of Paris, her husband accepting “posts” as in the old days when he had had enough of the Ministry), seemed to her an indelicacy on the part of my friend which she rebuked indirectly by repeating a saying current at Combray:

“Let’s eat my bread.”

“Ay, that’s the stuff.”

“Let’s eat thy bread.”

“I’ve had enough.”

I pretended to be writing.

“Who were you writing to?” Albertine asked me as she entered the room.

“To a pretty little friend of mine, Gilberte Swann. Don’t you know her?”

“No.”

I decided not to question Albertine as to how she had spent the evening, feeling that I should only reproach her and that we should have no time left, seeing how late it was already, to be reconciled sufficiently to proceed to kisses and caresses. And so it was with these that I chose to begin from the first moment. Besides, if I was a little calmer, I was not feeling happy. The loss of all equanimity, of all sense of direction, that we feel when we are kept waiting, persists after the arrival of the person awaited, and, taking the place inside us of the calm spirit in which we had been picturing her coming as so great a pleasure, prevents us from deriving any from it. Albertine was in the room: my disordered nerves, continuing to flutter, were still awaiting her.

“Can I have a nice kiss, Albertine?”

“As many as you like,” she said to me in her good-natured way. I had never seen her looking so pretty.

“Another one? You know it’s a great, great pleasure to me.”

“And a thousand times greater to me,” she replied. “Oh, what a pretty book-cover you have there!”