I advised Françoise and the butler to go to bed. (However, if Saint-Loup had amused himself that evening in the fashion which I suspected, it was only to pass the time of waiting, for he had been seized once more by the desire to see Morel and had made use of all his military connexions to find out in what regiment he was serving, so that he could go and see him, but so far had only received hundreds of contradictory answers.) But the butler was never in a hurry to leave Françoise now that, thanks to the war, he had found a means of torturing her even more efficacious than the expulsion of the nuns or the Dreyfus case. That evening, and every time I went near them during the few more days that I spent in Paris before leaving to go to a new sanatorium, I heard the butler say to a terrified Françoise: “They’re not in a hurry of course, they’re biding their time, but when the time is ripe they will take Paris, and on that day we shall see no mercy!” “Heavens above, Mother of God,” cried Françoise, “aren’t they satisfied to have conquered poor Belgium? She suffered enough, that one, at the time of her innovation.” “Belgium, Françoise? What they did in Belgium will be nothing compared to this!” And as the war had flooded the conversation of working-class people with a quantity of terms with which they had become acquainted through their eyes alone, by reading the newspapers, and which they consequently did not know how to pronounce, the butler went on to say: “I cannot understand how everybody can be so stupid. You will see, Françoise, they are preparing a new attack with a wider scoop than all the others.” At this I rebelled, if not in the name of pity for Françoise and strategic common sense, at least in that of grammar, and declared that the word should be pronounced “scope,” but succeeded only in causing the terrible phrase to be repeated to Françoise every time I entered the kitchen, for to the butler the pleasure of alarming his companion was scarcely greater than that of showing his master that, though he had once been a gardener at Combray and was a mere butler, he was nevertheless a good Frenchman according to the rule of Saint-André-des-Champs and possessed, by virtue of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the right to use the pronunciation “scoop” in full independence and not to let himself be dictated to on a point which formed no part of his service and upon which in consequence, since the Revolution had made us all equals, he need listen to nobody.
To my annoyance, therefore, I had to listen to him talking to Françoise about an operation of wide “scoop” with an emphasis which was intended to prove to me that this pronunciation was the result not of ignorance but of an act of will following upon ripe reflexion. He confounded the government and the newspapers in a single “they” full of mistrust, saying: “They tell us about the losses of the Boches, they don’t tell us about our own, it seems that they are ten times as big. They tell us that the enemy are at the end of their tether, that they have nothing to eat, personally I believe they are a hundred times better off than we are for food. It’s no use stuffing us with lies. If the enemy had nothing to eat, they wouldn’t fight as they did the other day when they killed a hundred thousand of our young men not twenty years old.” Thus at every moment he exaggerated the triumphs of the Germans, as in the past he had those of the Radicals; and at the same time he recounted their atrocities in order that these triumphs might be yet more painful to Françoise, who never stopped saying: “Ah! Holy Mother of the Angels! Ah! Mary, Mother of God!,” and sometimes, in order to be disagreeable to her in a different way, he said: “Anyhow, we are no better than they are, what we’re doing in Greece is no prettier than what they have done in Belgium. You will see that we shall turn everybody against us, we shall find ourselves fighting every nation in the world,” whereas the truth was exactly the opposite. On days when the news was good he destroyed its effect by assuring Françoise