In Search of Lost Time (12 page)

Combray, from far away, for ten leagues around, seen from the railroad when we arrived there the last week before Easter, was no more than a church summing up the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it into the distance, and, when one approached, holding close around its high dark cloak, in the middle of a field, against the wind, like a shepherdess her sheep, the woolly grey backs of the gathered houses, which a vestige of medieval ramparts girdled here and there with a line as perfectly circular as a small town in a primitive painting. To live in, Combray was a little dreary, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackish stones of the countryside, fronted by outside steps, capped with gables that cast shadows down before them, were so dark that once the daylight began to fade one had to draw back the curtains in the ‘formal rooms'; streets with the solemn names of saints (of whom many were connected to the history of the earliest seigneurs of Combray): the rue Saint-Hilaire, the rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood, the rue Sainte-Hildegarde, along which her railings ran, and the rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which opened the little side-gate of her garden; and these streets of Combray exist in a part of my memory so withdrawn, painted in colours so different from those that now coat the world for me, that in truth all of them, and also the church that rose above them on the Square, appear to me more unreal even than the projections of the magic lantern; and that at certain moments, it seems to me that to be able to cross the rue Saint-Hilaire again, to be able to take a room in the rue de l'Oiseau – at the old Hôtellerie de l'Oiseau Flesché, from whose basement windows rose a smell of cooking that now and then still rises in me as intermittently and as warmly – would be to enter into contact with the Beyond in a
manner more marvellously supernatural than making the acquaintance of Golo or chatting with Genevieve de Brabant.

My grandfather's cousin – my great-aunt – in whose house we lived, was the mother of that Aunt Léonie who, after the death of her husband, my Uncle Octave, no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her bedroom, then her bed and no longer ‘came down', always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety. Her own rooms looked out on the rue Saint-Jacques, which ended much farther away in the Grand-Pré (as opposed to the Petit-Pré, a green in the middle of the town where three streets met), and which, smooth and grey, with the three high steps of sandstone before almost every door, seemed like a defile hewn by a cutter of Gothic images right out of the same stone from which he would have sculpted a creche or a calvary. My aunt effectively confined her life to two adjoining rooms, staying in one of them in the afternoon while the other was aired. These were the sorts of provincial rooms which – just as in certain countries entire tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or perfumed by myriad protozoa that we cannot see – enchant us with the thousand smells emanating from the virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret, invisible, superabundant and moral life which the atmosphere holds in suspense; smells still natural, certainly, and the colour of the weather like those of the neighbouring countryside, but already homey, human and enclosed, an exquisite, ingenious and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupboard; seasonal, but moveable and domestic, correcting the piquancy of the hoarfrost with the sweetness of warm bread, as lazy and punctual as a village clock, idle and orderly, heedless and foresightful, linen smells, morning smells, pious smells, happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a quality of the prosaic that serves as a great reservoir of poetry to one who passes through it without having lived in it. The air was saturated with the finest flour of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I could move through it only with a sort of greed, especially on those first mornings of Easter week, still cold, when I tasted it more keenly because I had only just arrived in Combray: before I went in to say good morning to my aunt, they made me wait for a moment, in the
first room where the sun, still wintry, had come to warm itself before the fire, already lit between the two bricks and coating the whole room with an odour of soot, having the same effect as one of those great country ‘front-of-the-ovens', or one of those château mantelpieces, beneath which one sits hoping that outdoors there will be an onset of rain, snow, even some catastrophic deluge so as to add, to the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation; I would take a few steps from the prayer stool to the armchairs of stamped velvet always covered with a crocheted antimacassar; and as the fire baked like a dough the appetizing smells with which the air of the room was all curdled and which had already been kneaded and made to ‘rise' by the damp and sunny coolness of the morning, it flaked them, gilded them, puckered them, puffed them, making them into an invisible, palpable country pastry, an immense ‘turnover' in which, having barely tasted the crisper, more delicate, more highly regarded but also drier aromas of the cupboard, the chest of drawers, the floral wallpaper, I would always come back with an unavowed covetousness to snare myself in the central, sticky, stale, indigestible and fruity smell of the flowered coverlet.

In the next room, I would hear my aunt talking all alone in an undertone. She always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly, but she never remained for long, even alone, without saying something, because she believed it was beneficial to her throat and that if she prevented the blood from stopping there, she would reduce the frequency of the fits of breathlessness and the spasms from which she suffered; besides, in the absolute inertia in which she lived, she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance; she endowed them with a motility that made it difficult for her to keep them to herself, and lacking a confidant to whom she could communicate them, she announced them to herself, in a perpetual monologue that was her only form of activity. Unfortunately, having acquired the habit of thinking out loud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the next room, and I often heard her saying to herself: ‘I must be sure to remember that I did not sleep' (for never sleeping was her great claim, and the
language we all used deferred to it and was marked by it: in the morning Françoise did not come to ‘wake' her, but ‘entered' her room; when my aunt wanted to take a nap during the day, we said she wanted to ‘reflect' or ‘rest'; and when she happened to forget herself, while chatting, so far as to say: ‘what woke me up' or ‘I dreamed that', she would blush and correct herself instantly).

After a moment I would go in and kiss her; Françoise would be steeping her tea; or, if my aunt was feeling agitated, she would ask instead for her infusion and I would be the one entrusted with pouring from the pharmacy bag on to a plate the quantity of lime-blossom which then had to be put into the boiling water. The drying of the stems had curved them into a whimsical trellis-work in whose interlacings the pale flowers opened, as if a painter had arranged them, had made them pose in the most ornamental way. The leaves, having lost or changed their aspect, looked like the most disparate things, a fly's transparent wing, the white back of a label, a rose petal, but these things had been heaped up, crushed or woven as in the construction of a nest. A thousand small useless details – the charming prodigality of the pharmacist – that would have been eliminated in an artificial preparation gave me, like a book in which one is amazed to encounter the name of a person one knows, the pleasure of realizing that these were actually stems of real lime-blossoms, like those I saw in the avenue de la Gare, altered precisely because they were not duplicates but themselves, and because they had aged. And since here, each new characteristic was only the metamorphosis of an old characteristic, in some little grey balls I recognized the green buds that had not come to term; but especially the pink lustre, lunar and soft, that made the flowers stand out amid the fragile forest of stems where they were suspended like little gold roses – a sign, like the glow on a wall that still reveals the location of a fresco that has worn away, of the difference between the parts of the tree that had been ‘in colour' and those that had not – showed me that these petals were in fact the same ones that, before filling the pharmacy bag with flowers, had embalmed the spring evenings. That candle-pink flame was their colour still, but half doused and drowsing in the diminished life that was theirs now, and that is a sort of twilight of flowers. Soon my aunt would be able to dip into the
boiling infusion, of which she savoured the taste of dead leaf or faded flower, a small madeleine, a piece of which she would hold out to me when it had sufficiently softened.

On one side of her bed was a large yellow chest of drawers of lemon-wood and a table that was akin to both a dispensary and a high altar, on which, below a small statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins, could be found her missals and her medical prescriptions, everything needed for following from her bed both the services and her regimen, for not missing the hour either of her pepsin or of Vespers. On the other side, her bed lay by the window, she had the street there before her eyes and on it from morning to night, to divert her melancholy, like the Persian princes, would read the daily but immemorial chronicle of Combray, which she would afterwards commentate with Françoise.

I had not been with my aunt five minutes before she would send me away for fear that I would tire her. She would hold out to my lips her sad, pale, dull forehead, on which, at this morning hour, she had not yet arranged her false hair, and where the bones showed through like the points of a crown of thorns or the beads of a rosary, and she would say to me: ‘Now, my poor child, off you go, get ready for Mass; and if you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too long amusing herself with all of you, she should come up soon to see if I need anything.'

Françoise, who had been in her service for years and did not suspect at that time that one day she would enter exclusively into ours, did in fact neglect my aunt a little during the months when we were there. There had been a time, in my childhood, before we went to Combray, when my Aunt Léonie still spent the winters in Paris with her mother, when Françoise was such a stranger to me that on January 1, before entering my great-aunt's, my mother would put a five-franc coin in my hand and say to me: ‘Take great care not to give it to the wrong person. Wait to give it until you hear me say, “Good morning, Françoise”; at the same time, I'll touch you lightly on the arm.' Hardly had we arrived in my aunt's dim hall than we would see in the shadows, under the flutes of a dazzling bonnet as stiff and fragile as if it were made of spun sugar, the concentric ripples of an anticipatory smile of
gratitude. It was Françoise, standing motionless in the frame of the little door of the corridor like the statue of a saint in its niche. When we were a little used to this chapel darkness, we could distinguish on her face the disinterested love of humanity, the fond respect for the upper classes excited in the best regions of her heart by the hope of a New Year's gift. Mama pinched my arm violently and said in a loud voice: ‘Good morning, Françoise.' At this signal, my fingers opened and I released the coin, which found a hand to receive it that was embarrassed but outstretched. But ever since we had begun going to Combray I knew no one better than Françoise, we were her favourites, she had for us, at least during the first years, not only as much regard as for my aunt, but also a keener liking, because we added, to the prestige of being part of the family (she had, for the invisible bonds formed between the members of a family by the circulation of the same blood, as much respect as a Greek tragedian), the charm of not being her usual masters. And so with what joy would she welcome us, feeling sorry for us that we did not yet have finer weather, the day of our arrival, just before Easter, when there was often an icy wind, while Mama asked her for news of her daughter and her nephews, whether her grandson was a pretty child, what they were planning to make of him, whether he was going to be like his grandmother.

And when there was no one else there, Mama, who knew that Françoise still mourned her parents, who had died years ago, would talk to her about them gently, ask her for a thousand details about what sort of life they had led.

She had guessed that Françoise did not like her son-in-law and that he spoiled the pleasure she took in being with her daughter, with whom she could not chat as freely when he was there. And so, when Françoise went to see them, a few leagues from Combray, Mama would say to her, smiling: ‘Isn't it so, Françoise, if Julien is obliged to be away and you have Marguerite all to yourself all day long, you'll be sorry, but you'll make the best of it?' And Françoise would say, laughing: ‘Madame knows everything; Madame is worse than those x-rays' (she said
x
with an affected difficulty and a smile to poke fun at herself, an ignorant woman, for using that erudite term) ‘that they brought in for Mme Octave and that see what you have in your heart,'
and disappeared, embarrassed that someone was paying attention to her, perhaps so that we would not see her cry; Mama was the first person who gave her that sweet sensation, the feeling that her life as a country woman, her joys, her sorrows could be of some interest, could be a reason for pleasure or sadness in someone other than herself. My aunt was resigned to managing without her to some extent during our stay, knowing how much my mother appreciated the service of this maid who was so intelligent and active, who was as beautiful at five o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a bonnet whose dazzling rigid flutes appeared to be made of porcelain, as she was when going to High Mass; who did everything well, working like a horse, whether she was in good health or not, but without a fuss, as though it were nothing, the only one of my aunt's maids who, when Mama asked for hot water or black coffee, brought them really boiling; she was one of those servants who, in a household, are at the same time those most immediately displeasing to a stranger, perhaps because they do not bother to win him over and are not attentive to him, knowing very well they have no need of him, that one would stop seeing him rather than dismiss them; and who are, on the other hand, those most valued by masters who have tested their real capacities, and do not care about the superficial charm, the servile chatter that makes a favourable impression on a visitor, but that often cloaks an ineducable incompetence.