Not only was this not so, but as soon as he spoke (quite perfectly as it happened) he was inclined rather to be cold and mocking. There resulted from this discord between his look and his speech a certain falsity which was not attractive, and by which he himself had the air of being made as uncomfortable as a guest who arrives in day clothes at a party where everyone else is in evening dress, or as someone who, having to speak to a royal personage, does not know exactly how he ought to address him and gets round the difficulty by cutting down his remarks to almost nothing. Jupien’s (here the comparison ends) were, on the contrary, charming. Indeed, corresponding perhaps to that inundation of the face by the eyes (which one ceased to notice when one came to know him), I soon discerned in him a rare intelligence, one of the most spontaneously literary that it has been my privilege to come across, in the sense that, probably without education, he possessed or had assimilated, with the help only of a few books hastily perused, the most ingenious turns of speech. The most gifted people that I had known had died young. And so I was convinced that Jupien’s life would soon be cut short. He was kind and sympathetic, and had the most delicate and the most generous feelings.

His role in Françoise’s life had soon ceased to be indispensable. She had learned to stand in for him. Even when a tradesman or servant came to our door with a parcel or message, while seeming to pay no attention to him and merely pointing vaguely to an empty chair, Françoise so skilfully put to the best advantage the few moments that he spent in the kitchen while he waited for Mamma’s answer, that it was very seldom that he went away without having ineradicably engraved in his mind 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”2 (for she knew nothing of what Saint-Loup used to call partitive articles, and said simply “have money,” “fetch water”), of their knowing us to be rich, it was not because wealth with nothing else besides, wealth without virtue, was in her eyes the supreme good; but virtue without wealth was not her ideal either. Wealth was for her, so to speak, a necessary condition failing which virtue 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 wealth.

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

“There’s some Guermantes who stay in the Rue de la Chaise,” began my father’s valet. “I had a friend used to work there; 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 grooms. ‘And after all, he ain’t my father,’ ”3 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, perceived, not the witticism that underlay these words, but the fact that there must be something witty in them since they bore no relation to the rest of the observation and had been uttered with considerable emphasis by one whom she knew to be a joker. She therefore smiled with an air of dazzled benevolence, 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 ceased to denounce 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 are liable to distress us, taking care not to give them any appearance of justification which might lessen our pain and perhaps give us some slight regard for an attitude which they make a point of displaying to us, to complete our torment, as being at once terrible and triumphant.

“The Duchess must be allianced with all that lot,” said Françoise, taking up the conversation again at the Guermantes of the Rue de la Chaise, as one resumes a piece of music at the andante. “I can’t recall who it was told me one of them 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 connexions, as Pascal founds the truth of Religion on Reason and on the authority of the Scriptures. For since she had only the single word “great” to express both meanings, it seemed to her that they formed a single idea, her vocabulary, like certain cut stones, 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 in Algiers, too.” (My mother and I had wondered for a long time who this cousin in 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 its toponymy, was thickly strewn with errors.) “I meant to talk to their butler about it . . . What is it now they call him?” She broke off as though putting to herself a question of protocol, which she went on to answer with: “Oh, of course, it’s Antoine they call him!” as though Antoine had been a title. “He’s the one could tell me, but he’s quite the gentleman, he is, a great pedant, you’d think they’d cut his tongue out, or that he’d forgotten to learn to speak. He makes no reply when you talk to him,” went on Françoise, who said “make reply” like Mme de Sévigné.