never ceased to gaze so fixedly. Then more pleasant memories returned to me. She was my grandmother and I was her grandson. Her facial expressions seemed written in a language intended for me alone; she was everything in my life, other people existed merely in relation to her, to the judgment that she would pass upon them; but no, our relations were too fleeting to have been anything but accidental. She no longer knew me, I should never see her again. We had not been created solely for one another, she was a stranger to me. This stranger was before my eyes at the moment in the photograph taken of her by Saint-Loup. Mamma, who had met Albertine, insisted upon my seeing her, because of the nice things that she had said about my grandmother and myself. I had accordingly made an appointment with her. I told the manager that she was coming, and asked him to let her wait for me in the drawing-room. He informed me that he had known her for years, her and her friends, long before they had attained “the age of purity” but that he was annoyed with them because of certain things that they had said about the hotel. “They can’t be very ‘gentlemanly’ if they talk like that. Unless people have been slandering them.” I had no difficulty in guessing that “purity” here meant “puberty.” As I waited until it should be time to go down and meet Albertine, I was keeping my eyes fixed, as upon a picture which one ceases to see by dint of staring at it, upon the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken, when all of a sudden I thought once again: “It’s grandmother, I am her grandson” as a man who has lost his memory remembers his name, as a sick man changes his personality. Françoise came in to tell me that Albertine was there, and, catching sight of the photograph: “Poor Madame; it’s the very image of her, even the beauty spot on her cheek; that day the Marquis took her picture, she was very poorly, she had been taken bad twice. ‘Whatever happens, Françoise,’ she said, ‘you must never let my grandson know.’ And she kept it to herself, she was always bright with other people. When she was by herself, though, I used to find that she seemed to be in rather monotonous spirits now and then. But that soon passed away. And then she said to me, she said: ‘If anything were to happen to me, he ought to have a picture of me to keep. And I have never had one done in my life.’ So then she sent me along with a message to the Marquis, and he was never to let you know that it was she who had asked him, but could he take her photograph. But when I came back and told her that he would, she had changed her mind again, because she was looking so poorly. ‘It would be even worse,’ she said to me, ‘than no picture at all.’ But she was a clever one, she was, and in the end she got herself up so well in that big shady hat that it didn’t show at all when she was out of the sun. She was very glad to have that photograph, because at that time she didn’t think she would ever leave Balbec alive. It was no use my saying to her: ‘Madame, it’s wrong to talk like that, I don’t like to hear Madame talk like that,’ she had got it into her head. And, lord, there were plenty days when she couldn’t eat a thing. That was why she used to make Monsieur go and dine away out in the country with M. le Marquis. Then, instead of going in to dinner, she would pretend to be reading a book, and as soon as the Marquis’s carriage had started, up she would go to bed. Some days she wanted to send word to Madame, to come down and see her in time. And then she was afraid of alarming her, as she had said nothing to her about it. ‘It will be better for her to stay with her husband, don’t you see, Françoise.’ ” Looking me in the face, Françoise asked me all of a sudden if I was “feeling indisposed.” I said that I was not; whereupon she: “And you make me waste my time talking to you. Your visitor has been here all this time. I must go down and tell her. She is not the sort of person to have here. Why, a fast one like that, she may be gone again by now. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Oh, nowadays, Mademoiselle Albertine, she’s somebody!” “You are quite wrong, she is a very respectable person, too respectable for this place. But go and tell her that I shan’t be able to see her today.”
What compassionate declamations I should have provoked from Françoise if she had seen me cry. I carefully hid myself from her. Otherwise I should have had her sympathy. But I gave her mine. We do not put ourselves sufficiently in the place of these poor maidservants who cannot bear to see us cry, as though crying were bad for us; or bad, perhaps, for them, for Françoise used to say to me when I was a child: “Don’t cry like that, I don’t like to see you crying like that.” We dislike highfalutin language, asseverations, we are wrong, we close our hearts to the pathos of the countryside, to the legend which the poor servant girl, dismissed, unjustly perhaps, for theft, pale as death, grown suddenly more humble than if it were a crime merely to be accused, unfolds, invoking her father’s honesty, her mother’s principles, her grandam’s counsels. It is true that those same servants who cannot bear our tears will have no hesitation in letting us catch pneumonia, because the maid downstairs
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