Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [41]
“Why, of course I knew him,” my grandfather would answer. “It was Prosper, Mme Bouillebœuf’s gardener’s brother.”
“Ah, good,” my aunt would say, reassured but slightly flushed; shrugging her shoulders and smiling ironically, she would add: “You see, he told me that you passed a man you didn’t know from Adam!” After which I would be warned to be more circumspect in future, and not to upset my aunt so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to see a dog go by which she “didn’t know from Adam” she never stopped thinking about it, devoting all her inductive talents and her leisure hours to this incomprehensible phenomenon.
“That will be Mme Sazerat’s dog,” Françoise would suggest, without any real conviction, but in the hope of appeasement, and so that my aunt should not “split her head.”
“As if I didn’t know Mme Sazerat’s dog!” My aunt’s critical mind would not be fobbed off so easily.
“Well then, it must be the new dog M. Galopin brought back from Lisieux.”
“Oh, if that’s what it is!”
“They say he’s a very friendly animal,” Françoise would go on, having got the story from Théodore, “as clever as a Christian, always in a good temper, always friendly, always well-behaved. You don’t often see an animal so gentlemanly at that age. Mme Octave, I’ve got to leave you now; I haven’t time to dilly-dally; it’s nearly ten o’clock and my fire not lighted yet, and I’ve still got to scrape my asparagus.”
“What, Françoise, more asparagus! It’s a regular mania for asparagus you’ve got this year. You’ll make our Parisians sick of it.”
“No, no, Mme Octave, they like it well enough. They’ll be coming back from church soon as hungry as hunters, and they won’t turn their noses up at their asparagus, you’ll see.”
“Church! Why, they must be there now; you’d better not lose any time. Go and look after your lunch.”
While my aunt was gossiping on in this way with Françoise I accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved our church, and how clearly I can see it still! The old porch by which we entered, black, and full of holes as a colander, was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides (as also was the font to which it led us) just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress itself on the stone, to carve grooves in it like those made by cart-wheels upon stone gate-posts which they bump against every day. Its memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray who lay buried there furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins, here oozing out in a golden stream, washing from its place a florid Gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor, and elsewhere reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately distended. Its windows were never so sparkling as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you could be sure it would be fine inside the church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between earth and heaven, and in whose slanting blue gleam, on weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more luxurious, with the sun showing off all its rich furnishings, had an almost habitable air, like the entrance hall—all sculptured stone and painted glass—of some hotel in the mediaeval style), you might see Mme Sazerat kneel for an instant, laying down on the seat next to hers a neatly