“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. In any case it’s not Catholic. And what’s more, 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 not so. “Courageous” meant simply hard-working.) “They do say, too, that he’s thievish as a magpie, but it doesn’t do to believe all you hear. The staff never stay long there because of the lodge; the porters are jealous and set the Duchess against them. But it’s safe to say that he’s a real idler, that Antoine, and his Antoinesse is no better,” concluded Françoise, who, in furnishing the name “Antoine” with a feminine suffix that would designate the butler’s wife, was inspired, no doubt, in her act of word-formation by an unconscious memory of the words chanoine and chanoinesse. If so, she was not far wrong. There is still a street near Notre-Dame called Rue Chanoinesse, a name which must have been given to it (since it was inhabited only by canons) by those Frenchmen of olden days of whom Françoise was in reality the contemporary. She proceeded, moreover, at once to furnish another example of this way of forming feminines, for she added: “But one thing sure and certain is that it’s the Duchess that has Guermantes Castle. And it’s she that is the Lady Mayoress down in those parts. That’s something.”

“I should think it is something,” said the footman with conviction, having failed to detect the irony.

“You think so, do you, my boy, you think it’s something? Why, for folk like them to be Mayor and Mayoress, it’s just thank you for nothing. Ah, if it was mine, that Guermantes Castle, you wouldn’t see me setting foot in Paris, I can tell you. I’m sure a family who’ve got something to go on with, like Monsieur and Madame here, must have queer ideas to stay on in this wretched town sooner than get away down to Combray the moment they’re free to start, and no one hindering them. Why do they put off retiring when they’ve got everything they want? Why wait till they’re dead? Ah, if only I had a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to keep me warm in winter, I’d have been back home long since in my brother’s poor old house at Combray. Down there at least you feel you’re alive; you don’t have all these houses stuck up in front of you, and there’s so little noise at night-time you can hear the frogs singing five miles off and more.”

“That must be really nice, Madame,” exclaimed the young footman with enthusiasm, as though this last attraction had been as peculiar to Combray as the gondola is to Venice. A more recent arrival in the household than my father’s valet, he used to talk to Françoise about things which might interest not himself so much as her. And Françoise, whose face wrinkled up in disgust when she was treated as a mere cook, had for the young footman, who referred to her always as the “housekeeper,” that peculiar tenderness which certain princes of the second rank feel towards the well-intentioned young men who dignify them with a “Highness.”

“At any rate you know what you’re about there, and what time of year it is. It isn’t like here where you won’t find one wretched buttercup flowering at holy Easter any more than you would at Christmas, and I can’t hear so much as the tiniest angelus ring when I lift my old bones out of bed in the morning. Down there, you can hear every hour. It’s only a poor old bell, but you say to yourself: ‘My brother will be coming in from the fields now,’ and you watch the daylight fade, and the bell rings to bless the fruits of the earth, and you have time to take a turn before you light the lamp. But here it’s day-time and it’s night-time, and you go to bed, and you can’t say any more than the dumb beasts what you’ve been about.”

“They say Méséglise is a fine place, too, Madame,” broke in the young footman, who found that the conversation was becoming a little too abstract for his liking, and happened to remember having heard us, at table, mention Méséglise.

“Oh! Méséglise, is it?” said Françoise with the broad smile which one could always bring to her lips by uttering any of those names—Méséglise, Combray, Tansonville. They were so intimate a part of her life that she felt, on meeting them outside it, on hearing them used in conversation, a hilarity more or less akin to that which a teacher excites in his class by making an allusion to some contemporary personage whose name the pupils had never supposed could possibly greet their ears from the height of the academic rostrum. Her pleasure arose also from the feeling that these places meant something to her which they did not to the rest of the world, old companions with whom one has shared many an outing; and she smiled at them as if she found in them something witty, because there was in them a great part of herself.

“Yes, you may well say so, son, it’s a pretty enough place is Méséglise,” she went on with a tinkling laugh, “but how did you ever come to hear tell of Méséglise?”

“How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-known place. People have told me about it oftentimes,” he assured her with that criminal inexactitude of the informant who, whenever we attempt to form an impartial estimate of the importance that a thing which matters to us may have for other people, makes it impossible for us to do so.

“Ah! I can tell you it’s better down there under the cherry trees than standing in front of the kitchen stove all day.”

She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since Eulalie’s death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had loved her as little in her lifetime as she loved anyone whose cupboard was bare, who was “perishing poor” and then came, like a good for nothing, thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put on airs.” It no longer pained her that Eulalie had so skilfully managed, Sunday after Sunday, to secure her “tip” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never ceased to sing her praises.

“So it was at Combray itself that you used to be, with a cousin of Madame?” asked the young footman.

“Yes, with Mme Octave—ah, a real saintly woman, I can tell you, and a house where there was always more than enough, and all of the very best—a good woman, and no mistake, who didn’t spare the partridges, or the pheasants, or anything. You might turn up five to dinner or six, it was never the meat that was lacking, and of the first quality too, and white wine, and red wine, and everything you could wish.” (Françoise used the word “spare” in the same sense as La Bruyère.)4 “It was she that always paid the damages, even if the family stayed for months and years.” (This reflexion was not really meant as a slur upon us, for Françoise belonged to an epoch when the word “damages” was not restricted to a legal use and meant simply expense.) “Ah, I can tell you people didn’t go away empty from that house. As his reverence the Curé impressed on us many’s the time, if there ever was a woman who could count on going straight before the Throne of God, it was her. Poor Madame, I can still hear her saying in that faint little voice of hers: ‘You know, Françoise, I can eat nothing myself, but I want it all to be just as nice for the others as if I could.’ They weren’t for her, the victuals, you may be quite sure.