In Search Of Lost Time. Volumes 1 to 7. Marcel Proust

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 erect upon her bed, called 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 returned alone, having failed to overtake Eulalie. “It is most provoking,” said my aunt, 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 any 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’—her ‘little jog-trot’ was, none the less, brutally disturbed on one occasion in this same year. Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it 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 nothing, 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 breathing, in what was almost distinguishable as a snore. I was just going to slip away when something, probably the sound of my entry, interrupted her sleep, and made it ‘change speed,’ as they say of motorcars nowadays, for the music of her snore broke off 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 where she was lying, and I stood there not knowing whether I ought to go forward or to retire; 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, a pious act of 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: “The Lord be praised! We have nothing to disturb 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 getting the mastery, and did not leave her the strength to reach it; she fell asleep, calm and contented, and I crept out of the room on tiptoe, without either her or anyone’s else ever knowing, from that day to this, what I had seen and heard.

      When I say that, apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my aunt’s ‘little jog-trot’ never underwent any variation, I do not include those variations which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical form, did no more, really, than print a sort of uniform pattern upon the greater uniformity of her life. So, 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 luncheon 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 luncheon until the regular hour, it would have ‘upset’ her as much as if she had had, on an ordinary day, to put her luncheon forward to its Saturday time. Incidentally this acceleration of luncheon gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be «mbroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, 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-humoredly, cordially, patriotically, “Hurry up; there’s no time to be lost; don’t forget, it’s Saturday!” while my aunt, gossiping 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, some one absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, “I say, an hour-and-a-half still before luncheon,” everyone else would be in ecstasies over being 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, and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Léonie about this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, “What, only two o’clock!” feeling the heavy throb go by him of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as a rule passed 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 so slipped unaccompanied into 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 luncheon 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 used to cause Françoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything that had ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that the nonplussed visitor should not have known, beforehand, that we had our luncheon an hour earlier on Saturday, it was still more irresistibly funny that my father himself (fully as she sympathised, from the bottom of her heart, with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of so simple a matter, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the other’s surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: “You see, 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 as well. There was more than that, the first time you told it.”

      My great-aunt herself would lay aside her work, 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 ‘Month of Mary’ devotions.

      As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on “the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to be encouraged in 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 these ‘Month of Mary’ services that I can remember having first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry; but, arranged upon the СКАЧАТЬ