In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [96]
The victory of the Allies seemed, if not near at hand, at least more or less certain, and it must unfortunately be admitted that the butler was greatly distressed at the prospect. For he had reduced the “world” war, like everything else, to the war which he was secretly waging against Françoise (of whom, nevertheless, he was fond, just as one may be fond of the person whom one enjoys infuriating every day by beating him at dominoes) and victory in his eyes took the shape of the first conversation in which he would have the pain of hearing Françoise say: “Well, it’s over at last, and they’ll have to give us more than we gave them in ’70.” He believed, nevertheless, that this fatal day of reckoning was perpetually about to arrive, for an unconscious patriotism made him suppose, like all Frenchmen, victims of the same mirage as myself since my illness, that victory—like my recovery—was just round the corner. This event he anticipated by announcing to Françoise that victory might perhaps come, but that his heart bled at the thought, for revolution would follow hard on its heels and then invasion. “Ah! this blooming war, the Boches will be the only ones to recover from it quickly, Françoise. They have already made hundreds of thousands of millions out of it. But as for their coughing up a sou to us, what nonsense! They will print that in the newspapers perhaps,” he added out of prudence and so as to be ready for any eventuality, “in order to appease the people, just as for three years now they have been saying that the war will be over tomorrow.” Françoise was only too easily disturbed by these words, because, having at first believed the optimists rather than the butler, she saw now that the war, which she had thought would end in a fortnight in spite of “the innovation of poor Belgium,” was indeed still going on, that we were not advancing (the phenomenon of fixed front warfare was beyond her comprehension) and that, according to one of the innumerable “godsons” to whom she gave everything that she earned with us, “they” were concealing various awkward facts. “It’s the working man who will have to pay,” concluded the butler. “They will take your field away from you, Françoise.” “Ah! God in Heaven!” But to these distant misfortunes he preferred nearer ones and devoured the newspapers in the hope of being able to announce a defeat to Françoise. He waited for pieces of bad news as eagerly as if they had been Easter eggs, hoping that things would go badly enough to terrify Françoise but not badly enough to cause him any material suffering. Thus the prospect of a Zeppelin raid enchanted him: he would have the spectacle of Françoise hiding in the cellars, and at the same time he was persuaded that in a town as large as Paris the bombs would never happen to fall just on our house.
Françoise meanwhile was beginning at moments to return to her Combray pacifism. She almost had doubts about the “German atrocities.” “When the war started we were told that the Germans were murderers, brigands, real bandits, Bbboches …” (If she gave several b’s to Boche, it was because the accusation that the Germans were murderers seemed to her quite plausible, but the idea that they were Boches, because of the enormity of the accusation, improbable in the extreme. Only it was not at all easy to understand what mysteriously terrifying sense Françoise gave to the word Boche, since the period she was talking about was the very beginning of the war, and also on account of the air of doubt with which she pronounced the word. For a doubt whether the Germans were criminals might be ill-founded in fact but did not contain in itself, from the point of view of logic, any contradiction. But how was it possible to doubt that they were Boches, since