Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [78]
As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church, walking by the side of a lady, the owner of a country house in the neighbourhood, whom we knew only by sight, my father had saluted him in a manner at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk; M. Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and with that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable and who, from the suddenly receding depths of their eyes, seem to have caught sight of you at the far end of an interminably straight road and at so great a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, commensurate with your doll-like dimensions.
Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a virtuous and highly respected person; there could be no question of his being out for amorous adventure and embarrassed at being detected, and my father wondered how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
“I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was vexed with us,” he said, “because among all those people in their Sunday best there is something about him, with his little cutaway coat and his soft neckties, so little ‘dressed-up,’ so genuinely simple; an air of innocence, almost, which is really attractive.”
But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that my father had imagined the whole thing, or that Legrandin, at the moment in question, had been preoccupied in thinking about something else. In any case my father’s fears were dispelled no later than the following evening. Returning from a long walk, we saw Legrandin near the Pont-Vieux (he was spending a few days more in Combray because of the holidays). He came up to us with outstretched hand: “Do you know, master booklover,” he asked me, “this line of Paul Desjardins?
Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
Isn’t that a fine rendering of a moment like this? Perhaps you have never read Paul Desjardins. Read him, my boy, read him; in these days he is converted, they tell me, into a preaching friar, but he used to have the most charming water-colour touch—
Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.” He took a cigarette from his pocket and stood for a long time with his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Good-bye, friends!” he suddenly exclaimed, and left us.
At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Françoise, a commanding officer with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stirring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right moment, finishing over the fire those culinary masterpieces which had been first got ready in some of the great array of vessels, triumphs of the potter’s craft, which ranged from tubs and boilers and cauldrons and fish kettles down to jars for game, moulds for pastry, and tiny pannikins for cream, through an entire collection of pots and pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable