In Search of Lost Time (23 page)

Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann called her, instructed by Françoise to ‘scrape' them, would have them beside her in a basket, her expression as mournful as though she were suffering all the misfortunes of the earth; and the light crowns of azure that girded the asparagus stalks above their tunics of pink were delicately drawn, star by star, as, in the fresco, are the flowers bound around the forehead or tucked into the basket of Virtue at Padua. And meanwhile, Françoise would be turning on the spit, as she alone knew how to roast them, one of those chickens which had carried the fragrance of her merits through the far reaches of Combray and which, while she was serving them to us at the table, would make the quality of gentleness predominate in my
particular conception of her character, the aroma of that flesh which she knew how to render so unctuous and so tender being for me only the specific perfume of one of her virtues.

But the day when, as my father consulted the family council about the encounter with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen was one of those on which Giotto's Charity, very ill from her recent confinement, could not get out of bed; Françoise, having no help now, was late. When I arrived downstairs she was busy, in the scullery that opened on to the poultry-yard, killing a chicken which, by its desperate and quite natural resistance, but accompanied by Françoise, beside herself as she tried to split its neck under the ear, with cries of ‘Filthy creature! Filthy creature!', put the saintly gentleness and unction of our servant a little less in evidence than it would, at dinner the next day, by its skin embroidered with gold like a chasuble and its precious juice drained from a ciborium. When it was dead, Françoise collected the blood, which flowed without drowning her resentment, had another fit of anger, and looking at her enemy's cadaver, said one last time: ‘Filthy creature!' I went back upstairs trembling all over; I wanted them to dismiss Françoise immediately. But who would have prepared me such cosy hot-water bottles, such fragrant coffee, and even… those chickens?… And in fact, everyone had had to make this cowardly calculation, just as I had. For my Aunt Léonie knew – as I did not yet know – that Françoise, who would for her daughter, for her nephews, have given her life without a murmur, was singularly hard-hearted towards other people. Despite this my aunt had kept her, for if she was aware of her cruelty, she valued her service. I gradually came to see that the gentleness, the compunction, the virtues of Françoise concealed scullery tragedies, just as history reveals that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed with their hands joined in church windows were marked by bloody incidents. I realized that, apart from her own relatives, human beings inspired her with more pity for their afflictions the farther away from her they lived. The torrents of tears she shed while reading in the newspaper about the misfortunes of strangers would dry up quickly if she could picture to herself at all precisely the person concerned. On one of the nights following the confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized by appalling
cramps: Mama heard her moaning, got up and woke Françoise, who, quite indifferent, declared that all this wailing was a sham, that the girl wanted ‘to be the centre of attention'. The doctor, who had been afraid of such attacks, had put a marker in a medical book we had, at the page on which they are described, and told us to consult it in order to find out what sort of first aid to give. My mother sent Françoise to get the book, warning her not to let the bookmark fall out. After an hour, Françoise had not returned; my mother, indignant, thought she had gone back to bed and told me to go to the library myself and see. There I found Françoise, who, having wanted to look at what the marker showed, was reading the clinical description of the attack and sobbing, now that the patient was a hypothetical one whom she did not know. At each painful symptom mentioned by the author of the article, she would exclaim: ‘Oh dear, Holy Virgin, is it possible that the good Lord would want a wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!'

But as soon as I called her and she came back to the bedside of Giotto's Charity, her tears immediately stopped flowing; she could recognize neither the agreeable sensation of pity and tenderness which she knew so well and had so often derived from reading the newspapers, nor any pleasure of the same sort, in the boredom and irritation of having had to get up in the middle of the night for her kitchen-maid; and, at the sight of the same sufferings whose description had made her cry, she now produced nothing more than some bad-tempered mutterings, even some nasty, sarcastic remarks, saying, when she thought we had gone and could not hear her: ‘She had only to stop herself from doing what you do to get this way! I'm certain she enjoyed it well enough! So she needn't make a fuss now! Anyways, the boy must have to be quite forsaken by the good Lord to want to go with
this
one. Oh dear! It's just as they used to say in my poor mother's patois:

Qui du cul d'un chien s'amourose,
         Il lui paraît une rose.
³²

Although, when her grandson had a little cold in the head, she would go off in the night even if she was ill, instead of going to bed,
to see if he needed anything, covering four leagues on foot before daybreak in order to be back in time to do her work, this same love of her own people and her desire to ensure the future greatness of her house was expressed, in her policy towards the other servants, by a consistent principle, which was never to let a single one of them become attached to my aunt, whom she took, moreover, a sort of pride in not allowing to be approached by anyone, preferring, when she herself was ill, to get up out of bed in order to give her mistress her Vichy water rather than permit the kitchen-maid access to the bedroom. And like the hymenopteron observed by Fabre,
³³
the burrowing wasp who, so that its young may have fresh meat to eat after its death, summons anatomy in aid of its cruelty and, after capturing a few weevils and spiders, proceeds with a marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce them in the nerve centre on which depends the movement of their legs but not their other life functions, in such a way that the paralysed insect near which it deposits its eggs provides the larvae, when they hatch, with prey that is docile, harmless, incapable of flight or resistance, but not in the least tainted, Françoise found, to serve her abiding desire to make the house intolerable to any other servant, ruses so clever and so merciless that many years later we learned that if we had eaten asparagus almost every day that summer, it was because their smell provoked in the poor kitchen-girl who was given the job of scraping them attacks of asthma so violent that she was obliged in the end to leave.

Alas, we had to change our minds definitively about Legrandin. On one of the Sundays following the meeting on the Pont-Vieux after which my father had had to admit his mistake, as Mass was ending and as something so far from holy was entering the church, with the sunlight and the noise from outdoors, that Mme Goupil, Mme Percepied (all the people who, just a short time before, when I arrived a little late, had kept their eyes absorbed in prayer so that I would have thought they did not even see me come in if, at the same time, their feet had not gently pushed back the little kneeling-bench that was blocking my path to my seat) began to converse with us loudly about quite temporal subjects as if we were already in the square, we saw on the blazing threshold of the porch, looking out over the motley tumult
of the market, Legrandin being introduced by the husband of that lady with whom we had just recently encountered him to the wife of another large landowner of the area. Legrandin's face expressed an animation, a zeal, that were quite extraordinary; he made a deep bow with a secondary recoil that brought his back sharply up past its starting position and that must have been taught him by the husband of his sister, Mme de Cambremer. This rapid straightening caused Legran-din's bottom, which I had not supposed was so fleshy, to flow back in a sort of ardent muscular wave; and I do not know why that undulation of pure matter, that quite fleshly billow, with no expression of spirituality and whipped into a storm by a fully contemptible alacrity, suddenly awakened in my mind the possibility of a Legrandin quite different from the one we knew. This lady asked him to say something to her coachman, and as he went over to the carriage, the imprint of timid and devoted joy which the introduction had set upon his face persisted there still. He was smiling, enraptured in a sort of dream, then he hurried back to the lady and, since he was walking more quickly than was his habit, his two shoulders oscillated ridiculously to the right and left, and so entirely did he abandon himself to this, without concern for anything else, that he looked like some inert and mechanical slave of happiness. Meanwhile, we were leaving the porch, we were going to pass right by him, he was too well-mannered to turn his head away, but he fastened his gaze, suddenly burdened by a profound reverie, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us and did not have to greet us. His face remained ingenuous above his straight and supple jacket that looked as though it had been led astray against its will into detestably splendid surroundings. And a polka-dotted Lavallière bow tie tossed by the wind in the Square continued to float in front of Legrandin like the flag of his proud isolation and noble independence. Just as we reached the house, Mama realized that we had forgotten the Saint-Honoré cake and asked my father to go back the way we had come, taking me with him, and tell them to bring it immediately. Near the church we met Legrandin, who was coming in the opposite direction escorting the same lady to her carriage. He passed close to us, did not break off his conversation with his neighbour, and from the corner of his blue eye gave us a little sign
that was in some way interior to his eyelid and which, not involving the muscles of his face, could go perfectly unnoticed by the lady he was talking to; but seeking to compensate by intensity of feeling for the somewhat narrow field in which he had circumscribed its expression, in the azure corner assigned to us he set sparkling all the liveliness of a grace that exceeded playfulness, bordered on mischievousness; he over-refined the subtleties of amiability into winks of connivance, insinuations, innuendoes, the mysteries of complicity; and finally exalted his assurances of friendship into protestations of affection, into a declaration of love, illuminating for us alone, at that moment, with a secret languor invisible to the lady, a love-smitten eye in a face of ice.

He had in fact asked my parents the day before to send me to dine with him that evening: ‘Come and keep your old friend company, he had said to me. Like a bouquet sent to us by a traveller from a country to which we will never return, allow me to breathe from the distance of your adolescence those flowers that belong to the springtimes which I too traversed many years ago. Come with the primrose, the monk's-beard, the buttercup, come with the sedum that makes the bouquet of love in Balzac's flora,
³⁴
come with the flower of Resurrection Day, the Easter-daisy and the garden snowdrop, which is beginning to perfume your great-aunt's paths even though the last snows dropped by the Easter showers have not yet melted. Come with the glorious silk raiment of the lily worthy of Solomon himself, and with the polychrome enamel of the pansies, but above all come with the breeze still cool from the last frosts, that will open the petals, for the two butterflies that have waited at its door since morning, of the first Jerusalem rose.'

At home they wondered if they ought to send me to have dinner with M. Legrandin even so. But my grandmother refused to believe he had been impolite. ‘Even you admit that he goes about dressed in very simple clothes, hardly those of a man of high society.' She declared that in any case, and at the very worst, if he had been, it was better to appear not to have noticed. In fact, my father himself, though he was the one most irritated by Legrandin's attitude, may still have harboured a last doubt as to what it meant. It was like any attitude or
action that reveals a person's deep and hidden character: it has no connection with anything he has said before, we cannot seek confirmation from the culprit's testimony for he will not confess; we are reduced to the testimony of our own senses concerning which we wonder, confronting this isolated and incoherent memory, if they were not the victims of an illusion; so that these attitudes, the only ones of any importance, often leave us with some doubts.

I had dinner with Legrandin on his terrace; the moon was shining: ‘This silence has a nice quality, does it not? he said to me; for wounded hearts such as mine, a novelist whom you will read later asserts that the only fit companions are shadow and silence.
³⁵
And you know, my child, in life there comes a time, still quite remote for you, when our weary eyes can tolerate only one light, that which a lovely night like this prepares and distils from the darkness, when our ears cannot listen to any other music but that which is played by the moonlight on the flute of silence.' I was listening to M. Legrandin's words, which always seemed to me so pleasant; but disturbed by the memory of a woman I had seen recently for the first time, and thinking, now that I knew Legrandin was friends with several of the prominent local aristocracy, that perhaps he knew this one, plucking up my courage I said to him: ‘Monsieur, do you know the lady… the ladies of Guermantes?', happy too that in pronouncing this name I was assuming a sort of power over it, by the mere fact of bringing it out of my daydreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of sound.

But at the name of Guermantes, I saw a little brown notch appear in the centre of each of our friend's blue eyes as if they had been stabbed by invisible pinpoints, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting floods of azure. The arc of his eyelids darkened and drooped. And his mouth, marked by a bitter fold, but recovering more quickly, smiled while his eyes remained sorrowful, like the eyes of a handsome martyr whose body bristles with arrows: ‘No, I don't know them,' he said, but instead of giving so simple a piece of information, so unsurprising an answer in the natural, everyday tone that would have been appropriate, he declaimed it stressing each word, bending forward, nodding his head, with the insistence one imparts, so as to be believed, to an improbable statement – as though the fact that he did not know
the Guermantes could be due only to a curious accident of fate – and also with the expressive force of a person who, unable to keep silent about a situation that is painful to him, prefers to proclaim it so as to give others the idea that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is easy, pleasant, spontaneous, that the situation itself – the absence of relations with the Guermantes – could well have been, not suffered, but desired by him, could result from some family tradition, moral principle or mystical vow specifically forbidding him any association with the Guermantes. ‘No, he went on, explaining his own intonation by what he said, no, I don't know them, I've never wanted to, I've always made a point of safeguarding my complete independence; deep down I'm a Jacobin in my thinking, you know. Many people have tried to save me, they told me I was wrong not to go to Guermantes, that I was making myself look like a boor, an old bear. But that's not the sort of reputation that dismays me, it's so very true! Deep down, I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books, scarcely more paintings, and the light of the moon when the breeze of your youth brings me the fragrance of the flower-beds that my old eyes can no longer distinguish.' I did not understand very clearly why, in order not to go to the houses of people whom one did not know, it was necessary to cling to one's independence, or how this might make one look like a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not being completely truthful when he said he cared only for churches, moonlight and youth; he cared very much for the people from the châteaux and in their presence was overcome by so great a fear of displeasing them that he did not dare let them see that some of his friends were bourgeois people, sons of notaries or stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth was to be revealed, that it be revealed in his absence, far away from him and ‘by default'; he was a snob. Certainly he never said any of this in the language my family and I loved so much. And if I asked: ‘Do you know the Guermantes?', Legrandin the talker would answer: ‘No, I have never wanted to know them.' Unfortunately, he was not the first Legrandin to answer, but the second, because another Legrandin whom he kept carefully concealed deep inside himself, whom he did not exhibit because that Legrandin knew some compromising stories about
our own, about his snobbishness, had already answered by the wound in his eyes, by the rictus of his mouth, by the excessive gravity in the tone of his answer, by the thousand arrows with which our own Legrandin had been instantly larded, languishing like a Saint Sebastian of snobbishness: ‘Alas! How you hurt me! No, I don't know the Guermantes, do not reawaken the great sorrow of my life.' And since this troublemaker Legrandin, this blackmailer Legrandin, though he did not have the other's pretty language, had the infinitely quicker speech consisting of what are called ‘reflexes', when Legrandin the talker wished to impose silence on him, the other had already spoken, and though our friend might grieve over the poor impression that his
alter ego
's revelations must have produced, he could only attempt to mitigate it.