In Search of Lost Time

advantage the few seconds that he spent in the kitchen, while he waited for Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that the stranger went away without having ineradicably engraved upon his memory the conviction that, if we “did not have” any particular thing, it was because we had “no wish” for it. If she made such a point of other people’s knowing that we “had money” (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive articles, and said simply “have money,” “fetch water”), of their realising that we were rich, it was not because riches with nothing else besides, riches without virtue, were in her eyes the supreme good in life; but virtue without riches was not her ideal either. Riches were for her, so to speak, a necessary condition of virtue, failing which virtue itself would lack both merit and charm. She distinguished so little between them that she had come in time to invest each with the other’s attributes, to expect some material comfort from virtue, to discover something edifying in riches.

As soon as she had shut the window again, which she did quickly⁠—otherwise Mamma would, it appeared, have heaped on her “every conceivable insult”⁠—Françoise began with many groans and sighs to put straight the kitchen table.

“There are some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my father’s valet; “I had a friend who used to be with them; he was their second coachman. And I know a fellow, not my old pal, but his brother-in-law, who did his time in the Army with one of the Baron de Guermantes’s stud grooms. Does your mother know you’re out?” added the valet, who was in the habit, just as he used to hum the popular airs of the season, of peppering his conversation with all the latest witticisms.

Françoise, with the tired eyes of an ageing woman, eyes which moreover saw everything from Combray, in a hazy distance, made out not the witticism that underlay the words, but that there must be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of his speech and had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a joker. She smiled at him, therefore, with an air of benevolent bewilderment, as who should say: “Always the same, that Victor!” And she was genuinely pleased, knowing that listening to smart sayings of this sort was akin⁠—if remotely⁠—to those reputable social pleasures for which, in every class of society, people make haste to dress themselves in their best and run the risk of catching cold. Furthermore, she believed the valet to be a friend after her own heart, for he never left off denouncing, with fierce indignation, the appalling measures which the Republic was about to enforce against the clergy. Françoise had not yet learned that our cruellest adversaries are not those who contradict and try to convince us, but those who magnify or invent reports which may make us unhappy, taking care not to include any appearance of justification, which might lessen our discomfort, and perhaps give us some slight regard for a party which they make a point of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.

“The Duchess must be connected with all that lot,” said Françoise, bringing the conversation back to the Guermantes of the Rue de la Chaise, as one plays a piece over again from the andante. “I can’t recall who it was told me that one of them had married a cousin of the Duke. It’s the same kindred, anyway. Ay, they’re a great family, the Guermantes!” she added, in a tone of respect, founding the greatness of the family at once on the number of its branches and the brilliance of its connections, as Pascal founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on the Authority of the Scriptures. For since there was but the single word “great” to express both meanings, it seemed to her that they formed a single idea, her vocabulary, like cut stones sometimes, showing thus on certain of its facets a flaw which projected a ray of darkness into the recesses of her mind. “I wonder now if it wouldn’t be them that have their castle at Guermantes, not a score of miles from Combray; then they must be kin to their cousin at Algiers, too.” My mother and I long asked ourselves who this cousin at Algiers could be until finally we discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of Angers. What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near. Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and especially that of place-names, was thickly strewn with errors. “I meant to talk to their butler about it. What is it again you call him?” she interrupted herself as though putting a formal question as to the correct procedure, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course, it’s Antoine you call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s the one who could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great scholar, you’d say they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no response when you talk to him,” went on Françoise, who used “make response” in the same sense as Mme. de Sévigné. “But,” she added, quite untruthfully, “so long as I know what’s boiling in my pot, I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s. Whatever he is, he’s not a Catholic. Besides, he’s not a courageous man.” (This criticism might have led one to suppose that Françoise had changed her mind about physical bravery which, according to her, in Combray days, lowered men to the level of wild beasts. But it was