In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [64]
It was true that the fantasy or wit of each vendor or vendress frequently introduced variations into the words of all these chants that I used to hear from my bed. And yet a ritual suspension interposing a silence in the middle of a word, especially when it was repeated a second time, constantly evoked the memory of old churches. In his little cart drawn by a she-ass which he stopped in front of each house before entering the courtyard, the old-clothes man, brandishing a whip, intoned: “Old clothes, any old clothes, old clo … thes” with the same pause between the final syllables as if he had been intoning in plainchant: “Per omnia saecula saeculo … rum” or “requiescat in pa … ce” although he had no reason to believe in the immortality of his clothes, nor did he offer them as cerements for the eternal rest in peace. And similarly, as the motifs, even at this early hour, were beginning to interweave with one another, a costermonger pushing her little hand-cart employed in her litany the Gregorian division:
Tender and green,
Artichokes tender and sweet,
Ar … tichokes
although she had probably never heard of the antiphonary, or of the seven tones that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium.
Drawing from a penny whistle, or from a bagpipe, airs of his own southern country whose sunlight harmonised well with these fine days, a man in a smock, carrying a bullwhip in his hand and wearing a Basque beret on his head, stopped before each house in turn. It was the goatherd with two dogs driving before him his string of goats. As he came from a distance, he arrived fairly late in our quarter; and the women came running out with bowls to receive the milk that was to give strength to their little ones. But with the Pyrenean airs of this benign shepherd was now blended the bell of the grinder, who cried: “Knives, scissors, razors.” With him the saw-setter was unable to compete, for, lacking an instrument, he had to be content with calling: “Any saws to set? Here’s the setter!” while in a gayer mood the tinker, after enumerating the pots, pans and everything else that he repaired, struck up the refrain:
Tan, ran, tan, tan, ran, tan,
For pots or cans, oh! I’m your man.
I’ll mend them all with a tink, tink, tink,
And never leave a chink, chink, chink,
and little Italians carrying big iron boxes painted red, upon which the numbers—winning and losing—were marked, and flourishing their rattles, issued the invitation: “Enjoy yourselves, ladies, here’s a treat.”
Françoise brought in the Figaro. A glance was sufficient to show me that my article had still not appeared. She told me that Albertine had asked whether she might come to my room and sent word that she had after all given up the idea of calling upon the Verdurins and had decided to go, as I had advised her, to the “special” matinee at the Trocadéro—what nowadays would be called, though with considerably less significance, a “gala” matinee—after a short ride which she had promised to take with Andrée. Now that I knew that she had abandoned her possibly nefarious intention of going to see Mme Verdurin, I said with a laugh: “Tell her to come in,” and told myself that she might go wherever she chose and that it was all the same to me. I knew that by the end of the afternoon, when dusk began to fall, I should probably be a different man, moping, attaching to every one of Albertine’s movements an importance that they did not possess at this morning hour when the weather was so fine. For my insouciance was accompanied by a clear notion of its cause, but was in no way modified thereby.
“Françoise assured me that you were awake and that I wouldn’t be disturbing you,” said Albertine as she entered the room. And since, next to making me catch cold by opening the window at the wrong moment, what Albertine