In Search of Lost Time (13 page)

When Françoise, having seen that my parents had everything they needed, went back for the first time to give my aunt her pepsin and ask what she would like to have for lunch, it was quite rare that she was not already required to offer an opinion or provide explanations about some event of importance:

– Françoise, imagine, Mme Goupil went past more than a quarter of an hour late going to fetch her sister; if she lingers along the way it wouldn't surprise me at all if she were to arrive after the elevation.

– Well, there wouldn't be anything astonishing in that, answered Françoise.

– Françoise, if you had come five minutes earlier you would have seen Mme Imbert go past carrying some asparagus twice as fat as Mère Callot's; now try to find out from her maid where she got them. You
have been serving us asparagus in every sauce this year; you of all people might have found some like those for our travellers.

– It wouldn't be surprising if they came from M. le Curé's, said Françoise.

– Ah! Do you expect me to believe that, my poor Françoise? answered my aunt, shrugging her shoulders. From M. le Curé's! You know very well he grows only wretched, spindly little asparagus. I tell you these were as fat as a woman's arm. Not your arm, of course, but one like mine, poor thing, which has got so much thinner again this year… Françoise, didn't you hear those chimes that nearly split my head open?

– No, Madame Octave.

– Ah, my poor girl, you must have a solid head, you can thank the Good Lord for that. It was Maguelone coming to get Doctor Piperaud. He came back out with her right away and they turned into the rue de l'Oiseau. Some child must be ill.

– Oh my, dear God, sighed Françoise, who could not hear of a misfortune occurring to a stranger, even in a distant part of the world, without beginning to lament.

– Françoise, now who were they ringing the passing bell for? Oh, dear God, it must have been for Mme Rousseau. I'm blessed if I hadn't forgotten that she passed away the other night. Oh, it's time for the Good Lord to call me home, I don't know what I've done with my head since my poor Octave died. But I'm wasting your time, my girl.

– Not at all, Madame Octave, my time is not so precious; He who made it did not sell it to us. I'm only just going to see that my fire isn't out.

In this way Françoise and my aunt together appraised, during that morning session, the first events of the day. But sometimes those events assumed a character so mysterious and so grave that my aunt felt she could not wait for the moment when Françoise would come up, and four astounding peals of the bell would echo through the house.

– But Madame Octave, it isn't time for your pepsin yet, Françoise would say. Were you feeling faint?

– Not at all, Françoise, my aunt would say, or rather yes, you know
quite well that there are very few occasions now when I don't feel faint; one day I'll pass away like Mme Rousseau without even time to collect myself; but that's not why I rang. Would you believe that I just saw Mme Goupil as clearly as I see you now with a little girl whom I don't know at all? Now go fetch two sous' worth of salt at Camus's. It's not often that Théodore can't tell you who someone is.

– But that'll be M. Pupin's daughter,' Françoise would say, preferring to be satisfied with an immediate explanation since she had already been to Camus's twice that morning.

– M. Pupin's daughter! Oh, do you expect me to believe that, my poor Françoise? And you think I wouldn't have recognized her?

– But I don't mean the big one, Madame Octave, I mean the little one that's away at school in Jouy. I think I saw her once already this morning.

– Ah! That must be it, said my aunt. It must be she's come for the holidays. That's it! There's no need to ask, she will have come for the holidays. But then any time now we might very likely see Mme Sazerat come and ring at her sister's for lunch. That's what it is! I saw Galopin's boy going past with a tart! You'll see, the tart was on its way to Mme Goupil's.

– Once Mme Goupil has a visitor, Madame Octave, it won't be long before you'll see all her folk coming back for lunch, because it's not so early as it was, said Françoise, who, in a hurry to go back down in order to see to lunch, was not sorry to leave my aunt the prospect of this distraction.

– Oh, not before noon! answered my aunt in a tone of resignation, casting an uneasy glance at the clock, yet furtively so as not to let it be seen that she, who had renounced everything, nevertheless took such a lively pleasure in learning whom Mme Goupil was having to lunch, a pleasure that would unfortunately have to wait a little more than an hour longer. ‘And on top of that, it will happen during my lunch!' she added half-aloud to herself. Her lunch was enough of a distraction for her so that she did not wish for another one at the same time. ‘At least you won't forget to give me my eggs with cream in a flat plate?' These were the only plates with pictures on them, and my aunt amused herself at each meal by reading the inscription on the one
she was served that day. She would put on her glasses and spell out: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin or the Magic Lamp, and smile, saying: ‘Very good, very good.'

– I would certainly have gone to Camus's… Françoise would say, seeing that now my aunt would not send her there.

– No, no, it's not worth the trouble any more, it's certainly Mlle Pupin. My poor Françoise, I'm sorry to have made you come up for nothing.

But my aunt knew perfectly well it was not for nothing that she had rung for Françoise, since, in Combray, a person ‘whom one did not know at all' was a creature as scarcely believable as a mythological god, and in fact one could not remember when, any time one of these stupefying apparitions had occurred, in the rue du Saint-Esprit or on the square, well-conducted research had not ended by reducing the fabulous character to the proportions of a ‘person one knew', either personally or abstractly, in his or her civil status, as having such-and-such a degree of kinship with some people of Combray. It was Mme Sauton's son returning from military service, Abbé Perdreau's niece leaving the convent, the curé's brother, a tax-collector at Châteaudun, who had just retired or who had come to spend the holidays. One had had, upon seeing them, the shock of believing that there were in Combray people whom one did not know at all, simply because one had not recognized them right away. And yet, long in advance, Mme Sauton and the curé had let everyone know that they were awaiting their ‘travellers'. When in the evening I went upstairs, after returning home, to describe our walk to my aunt, if I was so imprudent as to tell her that we had met, near Pont-Vieux, a man my grandfather did not know, ‘A man Grandfather did not know at all! she would cry. Ah! I don't believe it!' Nonetheless somewhat disturbed by this news, she would want to clear the matter up, my grandfather would be summoned. ‘Now who did you meet near Pont-Vieux, Uncle? A man you didn't know? – But I did know him, my grandfather would answer, it was Prosper, the brother of Mme Bouilleboeuf's gardener. – Ah! All right,' my aunt would say, calmed and a little flushed; shrugging her shoulders with an ironic smile, she would add: ‘Now, he told me you had met a man you didn't know!' And they would advise me to be
more circumspect the next time and not to go on agitating my aunt with thoughtless remarks. One knew everybody so well, in Combray, animals and people, that if my aunt had chanced to see a dog pass by ‘whom she did not know at all', she would not stop thinking about it and devoting to this incomprehensible fact all her talents for induction and her hours of freedom.

– That must be Mme Sazerat's dog, Françoise would say, without great conviction but in order to pacify my aunt, and so that she would not ‘split her head in two'.

– As if I didn't know Mme Sazerat's dog! my aunt would answer, her critical mind not accepting a fact so easily.

– Ah! Then it will be the new dog M. Galopin brought back from Lisieux.

– Ah! That must be it.

– It seems it's quite an affable creature, added Françoise, who had got the information from Théodore, as clever as a Christian, always in a good humour, always friendly, always as agreeable as you might wish. It's uncommon for an animal of that age to be so well-behaved already. Madame Octave, I will have to leave you, I haven't time to enjoy myself, here it's almost ten o'clock, and my stove not lit yet, even, and I still have my asparagus to scrape.

– What, Françoise, more asparagus! Why, you've got a regular mania for asparagus this year. You'll make our Parisians grow tired of it!

– Why, no, Madame Octave, they like it very much. They'll come home from church with an appetite and you'll see, they won't eat it with the backs of their spoons.

– Church; why, they must be there already; you'd do well not to waste any time. Go and look after your lunch.

While my aunt was gossiping with Françoise, I was going to Mass with my parents. How I loved it, how clearly I can see it again; our Church! The old porch by which we entered, black, pocked like a skimming ladle, was uneven and deeply hollowed at the edges (like the font to which it led), as if the gentle brushing of the countrywomen's cloaks as they entered the church and of their timid fingers taking holy water could, repeated over centuries, acquire a destructive force, bend
the stone and carve it with furrows like those traced by the wheel of a cart in a boundary-stone which it knocks against every day. Its tombstones, under which the noble dust of the abbots of Combray, who were buried there, formed for the choir a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer inert and hard matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond the bounds of their own square shapes, which, in one place, they had overrun in a flaxen billow, carrying off on their drift a flowered Gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble; and into which, elsewhere, they had reabsorbed themselves, further contracting the elliptical Latin inscription, introducing a further caprice in the arrangement of those abridged characters, bringing close together two letters of a word of which the others had been disproportionately distended. Its windows never sparkled as much as on the days when the sun hardly appeared, so that, if it was grey outside, we were sure it would be beautiful inside the church; one was filled to its very top by a single figure like a king in a game of cards, who lived up there, under an architectural canopy, between heaven and earth (and in whose slanting blue light, on weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there is no service – at one of those rare times when the church, airy, vacant, more human, luxurious, with some sun on its rich furniture, looked almost habitable, like the hall of sculpted stone and painted glass of a medieval-style mansion – one would see Mme Sazerat kneel for a moment, setting down on the next prayer stool a packet of petits fours tied with string that she had just picked up from the pastry-cook across the street and was going to take back home for lunch); in another, a mountain of pink snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frosted the very glass itself, which it swelled with its cloudy sleet like a window-pane on which there remained a few snowflakes, but flakes lit by some aurora (by the same, no doubt, that flushed the reredos of the altar with tints so fresh they seemed set there momentarily by a gleam from outside about to vanish, rather than by colours attached for ever to the stone); and all were so old that here and there one saw their silvery age sparkle with the dust of the centuries and show, shimmering and worn down to the thread, the weft of their soft tapestry of glass. One of them, a tall compartment, was divided into a hundred or so small
rectangular panes in which blue predominated, like a great game of cards resembling the ones that were meant to entertain King Charles VI;
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but either because a beam of sunlight was shining, or because my gaze, as it moved, carried across the glass, snuffed and lit again by turns, a moving precious conflagration, the next moment it had assumed the changing lustre of a peacock's train, then trembled and undulated in a flaming and chimerical rain that dripped from the top of the dark rocky vault, along the damp walls, as if this were the nave of some grotto iridescent with sinuous stalactites into which I was following my parents, who were carrying their prayer books; a moment later the little lozenge-shaped panes had assumed the deep transparency, the infrangible hardness of sapphires which had been juxtaposed on some immense breast-plate, but behind which one felt, more beloved than all these riches, a momentary smile of sunlight; it was as recognizable in the soft blue billow with which it bathed the precious stones as on the pavement of the square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays when we had arrived before Easter, it consoled me for the earth being still bare and black, by bringing into bloom, as in a historical spring-time dating from the age of Saint Louis's successors, this dazzling gilded carpet of glass forget-me-nots.

Two high-warp tapestries represented the coronation of Esther (tradition had it that Ahasuerus had been given the features of a king of France and Esther those of a lady of Guermantes with whom he was in love), to which their colours, by melting, had added expression, relief, light: a little pink floated over Esther's lips outside the tracing of their outline; the yellow of her dress spread so unctuously, so thickly, that it acquired a kind of solidity and stood out boldly from the receding atmosphere; and the green of the trees, remaining vivid in the lower parts of the panel of silk and wool, but ‘gone' at the top, brought out in a paler tone, above the dark trunks, the lofty yellowing branches, gilded and half obliterated by the abrupt, slanting illumination of an invisible sun. All this, and still more the precious objects that had come into the church from figures who were for me almost legendary (the gold cross worked, they said, by Saint Eloi
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and given by Dagobert, the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic,
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of porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I moved through the church,
when we went to our seats, as though through a valley visited by the fairies, in which a country person is amazed to see in a rock, a tree, a pool, the palpable trace of their supernatural passage, all this made it, for me, something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions – the fourth being Time – extending over the centuries its nave which, from bay to bay, from chapel to chapel, seemed to vanquish and penetrate not only a few yards but epoch after epoch from which it emerged victorious; hiding the rough, savage eleventh century in the thickness of the walls, from which it appeared with its heavy arches plugged and blinded by crude blocks of ashlar only in the deep gash incised near the porch by the tower staircase, and even there concealed by the graceful Gothic arcades that crowded coquettishly in front of it like older sisters who, to hide him from strangers, place themselves smiling in front of a younger brother who is boorish, sulky and badly dressed; lifting into the heavens above the square a tower which had contemplated Saint Louis and seemed to see him still; and plunging down with its crypt into a Merovingian night, in which, groping their way as they guided us under the dark vault as powerfully ribbed as the wing of an immense stone bat, Théodore and his sister would light for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's
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little daughter, on which a deep scallop – like the mark of a fossil – had been dug, it was said, ‘by a crystal lamp which, on the night the Frankish princess was murdered, had separated of its own accord from the golden chains by which it hung on the site of the present apse and without the crystal breaking, without the flame going out, had sunk deep into the stone which gave way softly under it'.