In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [85]
“Ungrateful? No, Françoise, I think it’s I who am ungrateful. You don’t know how good she is to me.” (It was so comforting to me to appear to be loved!) “Off you go,”
“All right, I’ll hop it, double quick.”
Her daughter’s influence was beginning to contaminate Françoise’s vocabulary. So it is that all languages lose their purity by the addition of new words. For this decadence of Françoise’s speech, which I had known in its golden period, I was in fact myself indirectly responsible. Françoise’s daughter would not have made her mother’s classic language degenerate into the vilest slang if she had stuck to conversing with her in dialect. She had never hesitated to do so, and if they had anything private to say to each other when they were both with me, instead of shutting themselves up in the kitchen they provided themselves, right in the middle of my room, with a protective screen more impenetrable than the most carefully closed door, by conversing in dialect. I supposed merely that the mother and daughter were not always on the best of terms, if I was to judge by the frequency with which they employed the only word that I could make out: m’esasperate (unless it was myself who was the object of their exasperation). Unfortunately the most unfamiliar tongue becomes intelligible in time when we are always hearing it spoken. I was sorry that it was dialect, for I succeeded in picking it up, and should have been no less successful had Françoise been in the habit of expressing herself in Persian. In vain did Françoise, when she became aware of my progress, accelerate the speed of her delivery, and her daughter likewise; there was nothing to be done. The mother was greatly put out that I understood their dialect, then delighted to hear me speak it. I am bound to admit that her delight was a mocking delight, for although I came in time to pronounce the words more or less as she herself did, she found a gulf between our two pronunciations which gave her infinite joy, and she began to regret that she no longer saw people to whom she had not given a thought for years but who, it appeared, would have rocked with laughter which it would have done her good to hear if they could have listened to me speaking their dialect so badly. The mere idea of it filled her with gaiety and nostalgia, and she enumerated various peasants who would have laughed until they cried. However, no amount of joy could mitigate her sorrow at the fact that, however badly I might pronounce it, I understood it perfectly well. Keys become useless when the person whom we seek to prevent from entering can avail himself of a skeleton key or a jemmy. Dialect having become useless as a means of defence, she took to conversing with her daughter in a French which rapidly became that of the most debased epochs.
I was now ready, but Françoise had not yet telephoned. Should I set out without waiting for a message? But how could I be sure that she would find Albertine, that the latter hadn’t gone back-stage, that even if Françoise did find her, she would allow herself to be brought home? Half an hour later the telephone bell began to tinkle and my heart throbbed tumultuously with hope and fear. There came, at the bidding of an operator, a flying squadron of sounds which with an instantaneous speed brought me the voice of the telephonist, not that of Françoise whom an ancestral timidity and melancholy, when she was brought face to face with any object unknown to her fathers, prevented from approaching a telephone receiver, although she would readily visit a person suffering from a contagious disease. She had found Albertine in the lobby by herself, and Albertine, after going off to tell Andrée that she was not going to stay, had come straight back to Françoise.
“She wasn’t angry? Oh, I beg your pardon; will you please ask the lady whether the young lady was angry?