In Search of Lost Time (21 page)

Le bonheur des méchants comme un torrent s'écoule.
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But when the curé had come as well and his interminable visit had exhausted my aunt's strength, Françoise would leave the bedroom behind Eulalie and say:

– Madame Octave, I will let you rest, you look very tired.

And my aunt would not even answer, breathing a sigh that must, it seemed, be the last, her eyes closed, as though dead. But scarcely had Françoise gone down, than four peals dealt with the greatest violence would echo through the house, and my aunt, upright on her bed, would cry out:

– Has Eulalie gone yet? Can you believe it – I forgot to ask her if Mme Goupil arrived at Mass before the elevation! Quick, run after her!

But Françoise would return without having been able to catch up with Eulalie.

– It's vexing, my aunt would say, shaking her head. The only important thing I had to ask her!

In this way life went on for my Aunt Léonie, always the same, in the sweet uniformity of what she called, with affected disdain and deep tenderness, her ‘little routine'. Preserved by everyone, not only in the house, where we had all experienced the futility of advising her to adopt a better health regimen and so had gradually resigned ourselves to respecting the routine, but even in the village where, three streets away from us, the goods packer, before nailing his crates, would send word to ask Françoise if my aunt was ‘resting' – this routine was, however, disturbed once during that year. Like a hidden fruit that had ripened without anyone's noticing and had dropped spontaneously, one night the kitchen-maid gave birth. But her pains were intolerable, and since there was no midwife in Combray, Françoise had to go off before daybreak to find one in Thiberzy. My aunt could not rest because of the kitchen-maid's cries, and since Françoise, despite the short distance, did not come back until very late, my aunt missed her very much. And so my mother said to me in the course of the morning: ‘Go up, why don't you, and see if your aunt needs anything.' I went into the first room, and through the open door saw my aunt lying on
her side sleeping; I heard her snoring lightly. I was going to go away quietly, but the noise I had made had probably interfered with her sleep and made it ‘shift gears', as they say about cars, because the music of her snoring broke off for a second and resumed on a lower note, then she woke up and half turned her face, which I could now see; it expressed a sort of terror; she had obviously just had a horrible dream; she could not see me the way she was positioned, and I stayed there not knowing if I should go in to her or leave; but already she seemed to have returned to a sense of reality and had recognized the falsity of the visions that had frightened her; a smile of joy, of pious gratitude to God who permits life to be less cruel than dreams, weakly illuminated her face, and with the habit she had formed of talking to herself half-aloud when she thought she was alone, she murmured: ‘God be praised! Our only worry is the kitchen-maid, who is having a baby. And here I've gone and dreamed that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me go for a walk every day!' Her hand went out towards her rosary, which was on the little table, but sleep was overcoming her again and did not leave her the strength to reach it: she fell asleep, soothed, and I crept out of the room without her or anyone else ever finding out what I had heard.

When I say that except for very rare events, like that confinement, my aunt's routine never suffered any variation, I am not speaking of those variations which, always the same and repeated at regular intervals, introduced into the heart of that uniformity only a sort of secondary uniformity. And so, for instance, every Saturday, because Françoise went to the Roussainville-le-Pin market in the afternoon, lunch was, for everyone, an hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly violation of her habits that she clung to this habit as much as to the others. She was so well ‘routined' to it, as Françoise said, that if she had had to wait, some Saturday, to have lunch at the regular hour, this would have ‘disturbed' her as much as if on another day she had had to move her lunch forward to the Saturday hour. What was more, this early lunch gave Saturday, for all of us, a special face, indulgent and almost kindly. At a time when one usually has one more hour to live through before the relaxation of the meal, we knew that in a few seconds we would see
the arrival of some precocious endives, a gratuitous omelette, an undeserved beefsteak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those little events, internal, local, almost civic, which, in peaceful lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favourite theme of conversations, jokes, stories wantonly exaggerated: it would have been the ready-made nucleus for a cycle of legends, if one of us had had a propensity for the epic. First thing in the morning, before we were dressed, for no reason, for the pleasure of feeling the strength of our comradeship, we would say to one another with good humour, with warmth, with patriotism: ‘There's no time to lose; don't forget – it's Saturday!' while my aunt, conferring with Françoise and remembering that the day would be longer than usual, would say: ‘You might make them a nice bit of veal, since it's Saturday.' If at ten-thirty one of us absentmindedly drew out his watch and said: ‘Let's see, still an hour-and-a-half before lunch,' everyone was delighted to have to say to him: ‘Come now, what are you thinking of, you're forgetting it's Saturday!'; we would still be laughing over it a quarter of an hour after and we would promise ourselves to go up and report this lapse to my aunt to amuse her. Even the face of the sky seemed changed. After lunch, the sun, aware that it was Saturday, would linger an hour longer at the top of the sky, and when someone, thinking we were late for our walk, said: ‘What, only two o'clock?', watching, as they passed, the two strokes from the Saint-Hilaire steeple (which usually do not encounter anyone yet on paths deserted because of the midday meal or the afternoon nap, alongside the lively white stream which even the fisherman has abandoned, and go on alone into the empty sky where only a few lazy clouds remain), we would all answer him in chorus: ‘But you're wrong, we had lunch an hour early; you know very well it's Saturday!' The surprise of a barbarian (this was what we called anyone who did not know what was special about Saturday) who, arriving at eleven o'clock to talk to my father, found us at the table, was one of the things in her life which most amused Françoise. But if she found it funny that the dumbfounded visitor did not know we had lunch earlier on Saturday, she found it even more comical (while at the same time sympathizing from the bottom of her heart with this narrow chauvinism) that my father himself had not
realized that the barbarian might not know this and had responded with no further explanation to his astonishment at seeing us already in the dining-room: ‘Well what do you expect, it's Saturday!' Having reached this point in her story, she would wipe away a few tears of hilarity and to increase her own pleasure, would prolong the dialogue, invent what had been said in answer by the visitor, to whom this ‘Saturday' did not explain anything. And quite far from complaining about her embellishments, we would feel they were not enough for us and we would say: ‘But I think he also said something else. It was longer the first time you told it.' Even my great-aunt would put down her needlework, lift her head and look over her glasses.

What was also special about Saturday was that on this day, during the month of May, we would go out after dinner to attend the ‘Month of Mary'.

Since there we would sometimes meet M. Vinteuil, who was very severe about ‘the deplorable fashion of slovenliness in young people, which seems to be encouraged these days', my mother would take care that nothing should be wrong with my appearance, then we would leave for church. It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, which was so holy but which we had the right to enter, they were put up on the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they took part, their branches running out among the candles and holy vessels, attached horizontally to one another in a festive preparation and made even lovelier by the festoons of their foliage, on which were scattered in profusion, as on a bridal train, little bunches of buds of a dazzling whiteness. But, though I dared not do more than steal a glance at them, I felt that the ceremonious preparations were alive and that it was nature herself who, by carving those indentations in the leaves, by adding the supreme ornament of those white buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a popular festivity and a mystical celebration. Higher up, their corollas opened here and there with a careless grace, still holding so casually, like a last and vaporous adornment, the bouquets of stamens, delicate as gossamer, which clouded them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion of their flowering, I imagined it
as the quick and thoughtless movement of the head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white, dreamy and alive. M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and sat down beside us. He was from a good family and had been my grandmother's sisters' piano teacher, and when, after his wife died and he came into an inheritance, he retired near Combray, we often entertained him at the house. But he was extremely prudish, and stopped coming so as not to meet Swann, who had made what he called ‘an unsuitable marriage, as is the fashion these days'. My mother, after learning that he composed, had said to him in a friendly way that when she went to see him, he would have to let her hear something of his. M. Vinteuil would have taken great joy in this, but he was so scrupulous in his politeness and kindness that, always putting himself in the place of others, he was afraid he would bore them and appear egotistical if he pursued or even allowed them to infer his own desires. The day my parents had gone to visit him at his home, I had gone with them, but they had allowed me to stay outside and, since M. Vinteuil's house, Montjouvain, stood at the foot of a brush-covered hillock where I had hidden, I had found I was on a level with the second-floor drawing-room, a foot or two from the window. When the servant had come to announce my parents, I had seen M. Vinteuil hurry to place a piece of music in a conspicuous position on the piano. But once my parents had entered, he had taken it away and put it in a corner. No doubt he had been afraid of letting them think he was happy to see them only so that he could play them some of his compositions. And each time my mother had made a fresh attempt in the course of the visit, he had repeated several times: ‘I don't know who put that on the piano, it doesn't belong there,' and had diverted the conversation to other subjects, precisely because they interested him less. His only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her boyish appearance, seemed so robust that one could not help smiling at the sight of the precautions her father took for her sake, always having extra shawls to throw over her shoulders. My grandmother pointed out what a gentle, delicate, almost shy expression often came into the eyes of that rough-mannered child, whose face was covered with freckles. After she made a remark, she would hear it with the minds of the people to whom she had made it, would grow
alarmed at possible misunderstandings, and one would see, illuminated, showing through as though by transparency, under the mannish face of the ‘good fellow' that she was, the more refined features of a young girl in tears.

When, before leaving the church, I kneeled in front of the altar, I suddenly smelled, as I stood up, a bitter-sweet scent of almonds escaping from the hawthorns, and then I noticed, on the flowers, little yellower places under which I imagined that scent must be hidden, as the taste of a frangipani must be hidden under the burned parts, or that of Mlle Vinteuil's cheeks under their freckles. Despite the silence and stillness of the hawthorns, this intermittent scent was like the murmuring of an intense life with which the altar quivered like a country hedge visited by living antennae, of which I was reminded by the sight of certain stamens, almost russet-red, that seemed to have preserved the springtime virulence, the irritant power, of insects now metamorphosed into flowers.

We would talk with M. Vinteuil for a moment in front of the porch on our way out of church. He would intervene among the children squabbling in the square, take up the defence of the little ones, deliver a lecture to the older ones. If his daughter said to us in her loud voice how happy she was to see us, it would immediately seem as if a more sensitive sister within her were blushing at this thoughtless, tomboyish remark, which might have made us think she was asking to be invited to our house. Her father would throw a cloak over her shoulders, they would get up into a little cabriolet, which she would drive herself, and the two of them would return to Montjouvain. As for us, since it was Sunday the next day and we would not get up until time for High Mass, if there was moonlight and the air was warm, instead of having us go home directly, my father, out of a love of personal glory, would take us by way of the Calvary on a long walk which my mother's incapacity for orienting herself, or knowing what road she was on, made her consider the feat of a strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, whose spans of stone like great strides began at the railway station and represented to me the exile and distress that lay outside the civilized world, because each year as we came from Paris we were warned to pay careful attention, when Combray came,
not to let the station go by, to be ready ahead of time because the train would leave again after two minutes and would set off across the viaduct beyond the Christian countries of which Combray marked for me the farthest limit. We would return by way of the station boulevard, which was lined by the most pleasant houses in the parish. In each garden the moonlight, like Hubert Robert,
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scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its half-open gates. Its light had destroyed the Telegraph Office. All that remained of it was one column, half-shattered but still retaining the beauty of an immortal ruin. I was dragging my feet, I was ready to drop with sleep, the fragrance of the lindens that perfumed the air seemed to me a reward that one could win only at the cost of the greatest fatigue and that was not worth the trouble. From gates far apart, dogs awakened by our solitary steps sent forth alternating barks such as I still hear at times in the evening and among which the station boulevard (when the public garden of Combray was created on its site) must have come to take refuge, for, wherever I find myself, as soon as they begin resounding and replying, I see it, with its lindens and its pavement lit by the moon.