While, venturing down to the basement and endeavouring at the same time to escape notice and to avoid a scandal, M. Nissim Bernard, in his quest of the young Levites, put one in mind of those lines in La Juive:
O God of our Fathers, come down to us again,
Our mysteries veil from the eyes of wicked men!
I on the contrary would go up to the room of two sisters who had come to Balbec, as her maids, with an old lady, a foreigner. They were what the language of hotels called “couriers,” and that of Françoise, who imagined that a courier was a person who was there to run his course, two “coursers.” The hotels have remained, more nobly, in the period when people sang: “C’est un courrier de cabinet.”
Difficult as it was for a visitor to penetrate to the servants’ quarters, I had very soon formed a mutual bond of friendship, as strong as it was pure, with these two young persons, Mademoiselle Marie Gineste and Madame Céleste Albaret. Born at the foot of the high mountains in the centre of France, on the banks of rivulets and torrents (the water passed actually under their old home, turning a millwheel, and the house had often been damaged by floods), they seemed to embody the features of that region. Marie Gineste was more regularly rapid and abrupt, Céleste Albaret softer and more languishing, spread out like a lake, but with terrible boiling rages in which her fury suggested the peril of spates and gales that sweep everything before them. They often came in the morning to see me when I was still in bed. I have never known people so deliberately ignorant, who had learned absolutely nothing at school, and yet whose language was somehow so literary that, but for the almost savage naturalness of their tone, one would have thought their speech affected. With a familiarity which I reproduce verbatim, notwithstanding the praises (which I set down here in praise not of myself but of the strange genius of Céleste) and the criticisms, equally unfounded, in which her remarks seem to involve me, while I dipped crescent rolls in my milk, Céleste would say to me: “Oh! Little black devil with hair of jet, O profound wickedness! I don’t know what your mother was thinking of when she made you, for you are just like a bird. Look, Marie, wouldn’t you say he was preening his feathers, and turning his head right round, so light he looks, you would say he was just learning to fly. Ah! It’s fortunate for you that those who bred you brought you into the world to rank and riches; what would ever have become of you, so wasteful as you are. Look at him throwing away his crescent because it touched the bed. There he goes, now, look, he’s spilling his milk, wait till I tie a napkin round you, for you could never do it for yourself, never in my life have I seen anyone so helpless and so clumsy as you.” I would then hear the more regular sound of the torrent of Marie Gineste who was furiously reprimanding her sister: “Will you hold your tongue, now, Céleste. Are you mad, talking to Monsieur like that?” Céleste merely smiled; and as I detested having a napkin tied round my neck: “No, Marie, look at him, bang, he’s shot straight up on end like a serpent. A proper serpent, I tell you.” These were but a few of her zoological similes, for, according to her, it was impossible to tell when I slept, I fluttered about all night like a butterfly, and in the day time I was as swift as the squirrels. “You know, Marie, the way we see them at home, so nimble that even with your eyes you can’t follow them.” “But, Céleste, you know he doesn’t like having a napkin when he’s eating.” “It isn’t that he doesn’t like it, it’s so that he can say nobody can make him do anything against his will. He’s a grand gentleman and he wants to show that he is. They can change the sheets ten times over, if they must, but he won’t give way. Yesterday’s had served their time, but today they have only just been put on the bed and they’ll have to be changed already. Oh, I was right when I said that he was never meant to be born among the poor. Look, his hair’s standing on end, swelling with rage like a bird’s feathers. Poor ploumissou!” Here it was not only Marie that protested, but myself, for I did not feel in the least like a grand gentleman. But Céleste would never believe in the sincerity of my modesty and cut me short. “Oh! The storyteller! Oh! The flatterer! Oh! The false one! The cunning rogue! Oh! Molière!” (This was the only writer’s name that she knew, but she applied it to me, meaning thereby a person who was capable both of writing plays and of acting them.) “Céleste!” came the imperious cry from Marie, who, not knowing the name of Molière, was afraid that it might be some fresh insult. Céleste continued to smile: “Then you haven’t seen the photograph of him in his drawer, when he was little. He tried to make us believe that he was always dressed quite simply. And there, with his little cane, he’s all furs and laces, such as no Prince ever wore. But that’s nothing compared with his tremendous majesty and kindness which is even more profound.” “So then,” scolded the torrent Marie, “you go rummaging in his drawers now, do you?” To calm Marie’s fears I asked her what she thought of M. Nissim Bernard’s behaviour. … “Ah! Monsieur, there are things I wouldn’t have believed could exist. One has to come here to learn.” And, for once outrivalling Céleste by an even more
