47
Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was
no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of
it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about
its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a
shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses,
which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in
an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive
painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing, like its streets,
whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with
outside steps, capped with gables which projected long shadows down-
wards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down,
to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows; streets with the
solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the
early lords of Combray, such as the Rue Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-
Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood, the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde,
which ran past her railings, and the Rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which the
little garden gate opened; and these Combray streets exist in so remote a
quarter of my memory, painted in colours so different from those in
which the world is decked for me to-day, that in fact one and all of them,
and the church which towered above them in the Square, seem to me
now more unsubstantial than the projections of my magic-lantern; while
at times I feel that to be able to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to en-
gage a room in the Rue de l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau
Flesché, from whose windows in the pavement used to rise a smell of
cooking which rises still in my mind, now and then, in the same warm
gusts of comfort, would be to secure a contact with the unseen world
more marvellously supernatural than it would be to make Golo's ac-
quaintance and to chat with Geneviève de Brabant.
My grandfather's cousin—by courtesy my great-aunt—with whom we
used to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her
husband's (my uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave,
first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and fi-
nally her bed; and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an
indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and
religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue Saint-
Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as dis-
tinct from the Petit-Pré, a green space in the centre of the town where
three streets met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three high
steps of stone before almost every one of its doors, seemed like a deep
48
furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of stone
out of which he had fashioned a Calvary or a Crib. My aunt's life was
now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she
would rest in the afternoon while they, aired the other. They were rooms
of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air
or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we
cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours spring-
ing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system
of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their at-
mosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured
by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but
already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid
jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for
the store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic
smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet
savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, rov-
ing smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an in-
crease of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of po-
etry to the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived
amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bou-
quet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them
without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings,
chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, be-
cause I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my
aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room,
where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the
fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the
room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one
of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the
canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in
the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a cata-
strophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort
of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and
the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted
antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with
which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and
sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,'
puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an
invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry,
in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more
49
respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers,
and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed
gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible,
and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.
In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might
displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when
alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good
for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it would
make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she was liable;
besides, in the life of complete inertia which she led she attached to the
least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, endowed them with
a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to keep them secret,
and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate them, she used
to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue which was her
sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the habit of thinking
aloud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the
adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying to herself: "I must not
forget that I never slept a wink"—for "never sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Françoise would not 'call' her, but
would simply 'come to' her; during the day, when my aunt wished to
take a nap, we used to say just that she wished to 'be quiet' or to 'rest';
and when in conversation she so far forgot herself as to say "what made
me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she would flush and at once correct herself.
After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Françoise would be
making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask instead
for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's
little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for infu-
sion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them into a
fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale flowers opened, as though a
painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative
poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, as-
sumed those instead of the most incongruous things imaginable, as
though the transparent wings of flies or the blank sides of labels or the
petals of roses had been collected and pounded, or interwoven as birds
weave the material for their nests. A thousand trifling little details—the
charming prodigality of the chemist—details which would have been
50
eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which
one is astonished to read the name of a person whom one knows, the
pleasure of finding that these were indeed real lime-blossoms, like those
I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare,
altered, but only because they were not imitations but the very same
blossoms, which had grown old. And as each new character is merely a
metamorphosis from something older, in these little grey balls I recog-
nised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy,
moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of
stems from which they hung like little golden roses—marking, as the ra-
diance upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the
difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which
had not been 'in bloom'—shewed me that these were petals which, be-
fore their flowering-time, the chemist's package had embalmed on warm
evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still their colour, but half-
extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which was now theirs,
and which may be called the twilight of a flower. Presently my aunt was
able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she would relish the savour
of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of which she would hold
out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.
At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of lemon-
wood, and a table which served at once as pharmacy and as high altar,
on which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins,
might be found her service-books and her medical prescriptions,
everything that she needed for the performance, in bed, of her duties to
soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and for vespers. On
the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she had the street
beneath her eyes, and would read in it from morning to night to divert
the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily but immemorial
chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail afterwards
with Françoise.
I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would
send me away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss
her sad brow, pale and lifeless, on which at this early hour she would not
yet have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone like
the points of a crown of thorns—or the beads of a rosary, and she would
say to me: "Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for
mass; and if you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too long
amusing herself with you; she must come up soon to see if I want
anything."
51
Françoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did
not at that time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to
ours, was a little inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we
spent in her house. There had been in my infancy, before we first went to
Combray, and when my aunt Léonie used still to spend the winter in
Paris with her mother, a time when I knew Françoise so little that on
New Year's Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother
put a five-franc piece in my hand and said: "Now, be careful. Don't make
any mistake. Wait until you hear me say 'Good morning, Françoise,' and
I touch your arm before you give it to her." No sooner had we arrived in
my aunt's dark hall than we saw in the gloom, beneath the frills of a
snowy cap as stiff and fragile as if it had been made of spun sugar, the
concentric waves of a smile of anticipatory gratitude. It was Françoise,
motionless and erect, framed in the small doorway of the corridor like
the statue of a saint in its niche. When we had grown more accustomed
to this religious darkness we could discern in her features a disinterested
love of all humanity, blended with a tender respect for the 'upper classes'
which raised to the most honourable quarter of her heart the hope of re-
ceiving her due reward. Mamma pinched my arm sharply and said in a
loud voice: "Good morning, Françoise." At this signal my fingers parted and I let fall the coin, which found a receptacle in a confused but outstretched hand. But since we had begun to go to Combray there was no
one I knew better than Françoise. We were her favourites, and in the first
years at least, while she shewed the same consideration for us as for my
aunt, she enjoyed us with a keener relish, because we had, in addition to
our dignity as part of 'the family' (for she had for those invisible bonds
by which community of blood unites the members of a family as much
respect as any Greek tragedian), the fresh charm of not being her cus-
tomary employers. And so with what joy would she welcome us, with
what sorrow complain that the weather was still so bad for us, on the
day of our arrival, just before Easter, when there was often an icy wind;
while Mamma inquired after her daughter and her nephews, and if her
grandson was good-looking, and what they were going to make of him,
and whether he took after his granny.
Later, when no one else was in the room, Mamma, who knew that
Françoise was still mourning for her parents, who had been dead for
years, would speak of them kindly, asking her endless little questions
about them and their lives.
She had guessed that Françoise was not over-fond of her son-in-law,
and that he spoiled the pleasure she found in visiting her daughter, as
52
the two could not talk so freely when he was there. And so one day,
when Françoise was going to their house, some miles from Combray,
Mamma said to her, with a smile: "Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away, and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very
sorry, but will make the best of it, won't you?"
And Françoise answered, laughing: "Madame knows everything; Ma-
dame is worse than the X-rays" (she pronounced 'x' with an affectation of
difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered woman's,
daring to employ a scientific term) "they brought here for Mme. Octave,
which see what is in your heart"—and she went off, disturbed that any-
one should be caring about her, perhaps anxious that we should not see
her in tears: Mamma was the first person who had given her the pleasure
of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows,
might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to some
one other than herself.
My aunt resigned herself to doing without Françoise to some extent
during our visits, knowing how much my mother appreciated the ser-
vices of so active and intelligent a maid, one who looked as smart at five
o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and
dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for
churchgoing; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a
horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the ap-
pearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when
Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually
boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least sat-
isfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to
make a conquest of him and shew him no special attention, knowing
very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be in-
vited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on
the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses
who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that
superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a
stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in
which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.
When Françoise, having seen that my parents had everything they re-
quired, first went upstairs again to give my aunt her pepsin and to find
out from her what she would take for luncheon, very few mornings
pased but she was called upon to give an opinion, or to furnish an ex-
planation, in regard to some important event.
53
"Just fancy, Françoise, Mme. Goupil went by more than a quarter of an
hour late to fetch her sister: if she loses any more time on the way I
should not be at all surprised if she got in after the Elevation."
"Well, there'd be nothing wonderful in that," would be the answer. Or:
"Françoise, if you had come in five minutes ago, you would have seen
Mme. Imbert go past with some asparagus twice the size of what mother
Callot has: do try to find out from her cook where she got them. You
know you've been putting asparagus in all your sauces this spring; you
might be able to get some like these for our visitors."
"I shouldn't be surprised if they came from the Curé's," Françoise
would say, and:
"I'm sure you wouldn't, my poor Françoise," my aunt would reply,
raising her shoulders. "From the Curé's, indeed! You know quite well
that he can never grow anything but wretched little twigs of asparagus,
not asparagus at all. I tell you these ones were as thick as my arm. Not
your arm, of course, but my-poor arm, which has grown so much thinner
again this year." Or:
"Françoise, didn't you hear that bell just now! It split my head."
"No, Mme. Octave."
"Ah, poor girl, your skull must be very thick; you may thank God for
that. It was Maguelone come to fetch Dr. Piperaud. He came out with her
at once and they went off along the Rue de l'Oiseau. There must be some
child ill."
"Oh dear, dear; the poor little creature!" would come with a sigh from Françoise, who could not hear of any calamity befalling a person unknown to her, even in some distant part of the world, without beginning
to lament. Or:
"Françoise, for whom did they toll the passing-bell just now? Oh dear,
of course, it would be for Mme. Rousseau. And to think that I had forgot-
ten that she passed away the other night. Indeed, it is time the Lord
called me home too; I don't know what has become of my head since I
lost my poor Octave. But I am wasting your time, my good girl."
"Indeed no, Mme. Octave, my time is not so precious; whoever made
our time didn't sell it to us. I am just going to see that my fire hasn't gone
out."
In this way Françoise and my aunt made a critical valuation between
them, in the course of these morning sessions, of the earliest happenings
of the day. But sometimes these happenings assumed so mysterious or
so alarming an air that my aunt felt she could not wait until it was time
54
for Françoise to come upstairs, and then a formidable and quadruple
peal would resound through the house.
"But, Mme. Octave, it is not time for your pepsin," Françoise would begin. "Are you feeling faint?"
"No, thank you, Françoise," my aunt would reply, "that is to say, yes; for you know well that there is very seldom a time when I don't feel
faint; one day I shall pass away like Mme. Rousseau, before I know
where I am; but that is not why I rang. Would you believe that I have just
seen, as plainly as I see you, Mme. Goupil with a little girl I didn't know
at all. Run and get a pennyworth of salt from Camus. It's not often that
Théodore can't tell you who a person is."
"But that must be M. Pupin's daughter," Françoise would say, prefer-
ring to stick to an immediate explanation, since she had been perhaps
twice already into Camus's shop that morning.
"M. Pupin's daughter! Oh, that's a likely story, my poor Françoise. Do
you think I should not have recognised M. Pupin's daughter!"
"But I don't mean the big one, Mme. Octave; I mean the little girl, he
one who goes to school at Jouy. I seem to have seen her once already his
morning."
"Oh, if that's what it is!" my aunt would say, "she must have come over for the holidays. Yes, that is it. No need to ask, she will have come over
for the holidays. But then we shall soon see Mme. Sazerat come along
and ring her sister's door-bell, for her luncheon. That will be it! I saw the
boy from Galopin's go by with a tart. You will see that the tart was for
Mme. Goupil."
"Once Mme. Goupil has anyone in the house, Mme. Octave, you won't
be long in seeing all her folk going in to their luncheon there, for it's not
so early as it was," would be the answer, for Françoise, who was anxious
to retire downstairs to look after our own meal, was not sorry to leave
my aunt with the prospect of such a distraction.
"Oh! not before midday!" my aunt would reply in a tone of resigna-
tion, darting an uneasy glance at the clock, but stealthily, so as not to let
it be seen that she, who had renounced all earthly joys, yet found a keen
satisfaction in learning that Mme. Goupil was expecting company to
luncheon, though, alas, she must wait a little more than an hour still be-
fore enjoying the spectacle. "And it will come in the middle of my lunch-
eon!" she would murmur to herself. Her luncheon was such a distraction
in itself that she did not like any other to come at the same time. "At
least, you will not forget to give me my creamed eggs on one of the flat
plates?" These were the only plates which had pictures on them and my
55
aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the description on
whichever might have been sent up to her. She would put on her spec-
tacles and spell out: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," "Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," and smile, and say "Very good indeed."
"I may as well go across to Camus… " Françoise would hazard, seeing
that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.
"No, no; it's not worth while now; it's certain to be the Pupin girl. My
poor Françoise, I am sorry to have made you come upstairs for nothing."
But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung
for Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one 'didn't know at all'
was as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and it was apt to be
forgotten that after each occasion on which there had appeared in the
Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenom-
ena, careful and exhaustive researches had invariably reduced the fab-
ulous monster to the proportions of a person whom one 'did know,'
either personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more
or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to be
Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbé Perdreau's
niece come home from her convent, or the Curé's brother, a tax-collector
at Châteaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to
Combray for the holidays. On first noticing them you have been im-
pressed by the thought that there might be in Combray people whom
you 'didn't know at all,' simply because, you had failed to recognise or
identify them at once. And yet long beforehand Mme. Sauton and the
Curé had given warning that they expected their 'strangers.' In the even-
ing, when I came in and went upstairs to tell my aunt the incidents of
our walk, if I was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the
Pont-Vieux, a man whom my grandfather didn't know:
"A man grandfather didn't know at all!" she would exclaim. "That's a likely story." None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news, she would wish to have the details correctly, and so my grandfather
would be summoned. "Who can it have been that you passed near the
Pont-Vieux, uncle? A man you didn't know at all?"
"Why, of course I did," my grandfather would answer; "it was Prosper, Mme. Bouilleboeuf's gardener's br