Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [59]
Sometimes I would be torn from my book in the middle of the afternoon by the gardener’s daughter, who came running wildly, overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming “They’re coming, they’re coming!” so that Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That was on the days when the cavalry from the local garrison passed through Combray on their way to manoeuvres, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walk and were stared at in return, the gardener’s daughter, through the gap between two distant houses in the Avenue de la Gare, had spied the glitter of helmets. The servants had then hurried in with their chairs, for when the troopers paraded down the Rue Sainte-Hilde-garde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and submerging the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river in flood.
“Poor boys,” Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she had reached the railings, “poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a meadow. It’s just shocking to think of,” she would add, laying a hand over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
“A fine sight, isn’t it, Mme Françoise, all these young fellows not caring two straws for their lives?” the gardener would ask, just to “draw” her. And he would not have spoken in vain.
“Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world should we care for if it’s not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time? Alas, dear God! You’re right all the same, they don’t care! I can remember them in ’70; in those wretched wars they’ve no fear of death left in them; they’re nothing more nor less than madmen; and then they aren’t worth the price of a rope to hang them with; they’re not men any more, they’re lions.” For by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to pronounce “lie-on,” was not at all complimentary.
The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see them approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap between the two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could glimpse more helmets flashing past in the sunlight. The gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to come, and he was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his head. So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out as though from a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and after having risked her life a hundred times over, would reappear bringing us, together with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, reconciled, would discuss the line to be followed in the event of war.
“Don’t you see, Françoise,” he would say, “revolution would be better, because then no one would need to join in unless he wanted to.”
“Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it’s more straightforward.”
The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, all the railways would be shut down.
“Yes, to be sure; to stop people running away,” Françoise would say.
And the gardener would assent, with “Ay, they’re the cunning ones,” for he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which the State attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the world who would not run away from