The prosperity of the wicked
Drains away like a torrent.
But when the Curé had come as well, and by his interminable visit had drained my aunt’s strength, Françoise would follow Eulalie from the room, saying: “Mme Octave, I will leave you to rest; you look really tired out.”
And my aunt would answer her not a word, breathing a sigh so faint that it seemed it must prove her last, and lying there with closed eyes, as though already dead. But hardly had Françoise arrived downstairs when four peals of a bell pulled with the utmost violence reverberated through the house, and my aunt, sitting bolt upright in her bed, would call out: “Has Eulalie gone yet? Would you believe it; I forgot to ask her whether Mme Goupil arrived in church before the Elevation. Run after her, quick!”
But Françoise would return alone, having failed to overtake Eulalie.
“It is most provoking,” my aunt would say, shaking her head. “The one important thing that I had to ask her.”
In this way life went by for my aunt Léonie, always the same, in the gentle uniformity of what she called, with a pretence of deprecation but with a deep tenderness, her “little jog-trot.” Respected by all and sundry, not merely in her own house, where every one of us, having learned the futility of recommending a healthier mode of life, had become gradually resigned to its observance, but in the village as well, where, three streets away, a tradesman who had to hammer nails into a packing-case would send first to Françoise to make sure that my aunt was not “resting.” This “jog-trot” was none the less brutally disturbed on one occasion that year. Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved and falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid’s confinement. Her pains were unbearable, and, as there was no midwife in Combray, Françoise had to set off before dawn to fetch one from Thiberzy. My aunt was unable to rest owing to the cries of the girl, and as Françoise, though the distance was not great, was very late in returning, her services were greatly missed. And so, in the course of the morning, my mother said to me: “Run upstairs and see if your aunt wants anything.”
I went into the first of her two rooms, and through the open door of the other saw my aunt lying on her side asleep; I could hear her snoring gently. I was about to slip away when the noise of my entry must have broken into her sleep and made it “change gear,” as they say of motor-cars, for the music of her snore stopped for a second and began again on a lower note; then she awoke and half turned her face, which I could see for the first time; a kind of horror was imprinted on it; plainly she had just escaped from some terrifying dream. She could not see me from the position in which she was lying, and I stood there not knowing whether I ought to go forward or withdraw; but all at once she seemed to return to a sense of reality, and to grasp the falsehood of the visions that had terrified her; a smile of joy, of pious thanksgiving to God who is pleased to grant that life shall be less cruel than our dreams, feebly illumined her face, and, with the habit she had formed of speaking to herself half-aloud when she thought herself alone, she murmured: “God be praised! we have nothing to worry us here but the kitchen-maid’s baby. And I’ve been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me take a walk every day!” She stretched out a hand towards her rosary, which was lying on the small table, but sleep was once again overcoming her, and did not leave her the strength to reach it; she fell asleep, her mind at rest, and I crept out of the room on tiptoe without either her or anyone else ever knowing what I had seen and heard.
When I say that, apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my aunt’s daily routine never underwent any variation, I do not include those which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical form, did no more than print a sort of uniform pattern upon the greater uniformity of her life. Thus, for instance, every Saturday, as Françoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin, the whole household would have to have lunch an hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly exception to her general habits, that she clung to it as much as to the rest. She was so well “routined” to it, as Françoise would say, that if, on a Saturday, she had had to wait for her lunch until the regular hour, it would have “upset” her as much as if on an ordinary day she had had to put her lunch forward to its Saturday hour. Incidentally this acceleration of lunch gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when ordinarily there is still an hour to be lived through before the meal-time relaxation, we knew that in a few seconds we should see the arrival of premature endives, a gratuitous omelette, an unmerited beefsteak. The recurrence of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those minor events, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national tie and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided the ready-made kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of mind. Early in the morning, before we were dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of proving the strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another good-humouredly, cordially, patriotically, “Hurry up, there’s no time to waste; don’t forget it’s Saturday!” while my aunt, conferring with Françoise and reflecting that the day would be even longer than usual, would say, “You might cook them a nice bit of veal, seeing that it’s Saturday.” If, at half-past ten, someone absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, “I say, an hour-and-a-half still before lunch,” everyone else would be delighted to be able to retort at once: “Why, what are you thinking about? Have you forgotten that it’s Saturday?” And a quarter of an hour later we would still be laughing about it and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Léonie of this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, “What, only two o’clock!” on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as a rule met no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for the midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks of the bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and passed unaccompanied across the vacant sky, where only a few loitering clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus: “Why, you’re forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it’s Saturday.”
The surprise of a “barbarian” (for so we termed everyone who was not acquainted with Saturday’s special customs) who had called at eleven o’clock to speak to my father and had found us at table, was an event which caused Françoise as much merriment as anything that had ever happened in her life. But if she found it amusing that the nonplussed visitor should not have known beforehand that we had our lunch an hour earlier on Saturdays, it was still more irresistibly funny that my father himself (wholeheartedly as she sympathised with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of the fact, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the other’s surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: “After all, it’s Saturday!” On reaching this point in the story, Françoise would pause to wipe the tears of merriment from her eyes, and then, to add to her own enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply for the visitor to whom the word “Saturday” had conveyed nothing. And so far from our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story was not yet long enough, and would rally her with: “Oh, but surely he said something else. There was more to it than that, the first time you told it.” My great-aunt herself would lay aside her needlework, and raise her head and look on at us over her glasses.
The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May we used to go out on Saturday evenings after dinner to the “Mon
th of Mary” devotions.
As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on “the deplorable slovenliness of young people, which seems to be encouraged these days,” my mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for the church. It was in the “Month of Mary” that I remember having first fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at it except through my fingers, I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous adornment, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer and entirely veiling each corolla, that in following, in trying to mimic to myself the action of their efflorescence, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious.
M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us. He belonged to a good family, and had once been piano-teacher to my grandmother’s sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and inheriting some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. But with his intense prudishness he had given up coming so as not to be obliged to meet Swann, who had made what he called “a most unsuitable marriage, as seems to be the fashion these days.” My mother, on hearing that he composed, told him out of the kindness of her heart that, when she came to see him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would have liked nothing better, but he carried politeness and consideration for others to such scrupulous lengths, always putting himself in their place, that he was afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them, but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil’s house, Montjouvain, stood at the foot of a bushy hillock where I went to hide, I had found myself on a level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from its window. When the servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived, I had seen M. Vinteuil hurriedly place a sheet of music in a prominent position on the piano. But as soon as they entered the room he had snatched it away and put it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt, of letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject he had hurriedly protested: “I can’t think who put that on the piano; it’s not the proper place for it at all,” and had turned the conversation aside to other topics, precisely because they were of less interest to himself.
His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her somewhat boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to restrain a smile when one saw the precautions her father used to take for her health, with spare shawls always in readiness to wrap round her shoulders. My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle, delicate, almost timid expression which might often be caught flitting across the freckled face of this otherwise stolid child. Whenever she spoke, she heard her own words with the ears of those to whom she had addressed them, and became alarmed at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see in clear outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the “good sort” that she was, the finer features of a tearful girl.
When, before turning to leave the church, I genuflected before the altar, I was suddenly aware of a bittersweet scent of almonds emanating from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed on the flowers themselves little patches of a creamier colour, beneath which I imagined that this scent must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond cake lay beneath the burned parts, or that of Mlle Vinteuil’s cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the motionless silence of the hawthorns, this intermittent odour came to me like the murmuring of an intense organic life with which the whole altar was quivering like a hedgerow explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers.
On leaving the church we would stay chatting for a moment with M. Vinteuil in front of the porch. Boys would be chasing one another in the Square, and he would intervene, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the big. If his daughter said in her gruff voice how glad she had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though a more sensitive sister within her had blushed at this thoughtless, schoolboyish utterance which might have made us think that she was angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain. As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, my father, in his thirst for glory, instead of taking us home at once would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my mother’s utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, whose long stone strides began at the railway station and to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of civilisation, because every year, as we came down from Paris, we were warned to take special care when we got to Combray not to miss the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would start again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct out of the lands of Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the furthest limit. We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its iron gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column, half shattered but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time. I would by now be dragging my weary limbs and ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees seemed a reward that could be won only at the price of great fatigue and was not worth the effort. From gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up an antiphonal barking such as I still hear at times of an evening, and among which the Boulevard de la Gare (when the public gardens of Combray were constructed on its site) must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate challenge and response, I can see it again with its lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.
Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my mother—“Where are we?” Exhausted by the walk but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though he had produced it with his latchkey from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to us, where it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own garden, which had come, hand-inhand with the familiar corner of the Rue du Saint-Esprit, to greet us at the end of our wanderings over paths unknown. My mother would murmur admiringly “You really are wonderful!” And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so l
ong my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child.