Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [76]
but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt well and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire in which all the rest of us had already perished and which soon would leave not a single stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall. Inasmuch as no such event had ever occurred, though she must often have pondered its eventuality as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of patience (and though it would have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen contingencies, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imaginary calamities which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile herself with a sudden pretence that Françoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by herself, of playing her own and her adversary’s hands at once, she would first stammer out Françoise’s awkward excuses, and then reply to them with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her eyes blazing, her false hair askew and exposing the baldness of her brows. Françoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt’s feelings sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of substance and reality which she added to them by muttering them half-aloud. Sometimes, however, even these counterpane dramas would not satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged. And so, on a Sunday, with all the doors mysteriously closed, she would confide to Eulalie her doubts of Françoise’s integrity and her determination to be rid of her, and another time she would confide to Françoise her suspicions of the disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed for good. A few days later she would be sick of her latest confidante and once more “as thick as thieves” with the traitor, but before the next performance, the two would yet again have changed roles. But the suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally arouse in her were no more than a flash in the pan that soon subsided for lack of fuel, since Eulalie was not living with her in the house. It was a very different matter in the case of Françoise, of whose presence under the same roof as herself my aunt was perpetually conscious, though for fear of catching cold were she to leave her bed, she would never dare go down to the kitchen to establish whether there were any grounds for her suspicions. Gradually her mind came to be exclusively occupied with trying to guess what Françoise might at any given moment be doing behind her back. She would detect a furtive look on Françoise’s face, something contradictory in what she said, some desire