Françoise was in a sense less of a servant than the others. In her way of feeling things, of being kind and compassionate, harsh and disdainful, shrewd and narrow-minded, of combining a white skin with red hands, she was still the village girl whose parents had had “a place of their own” but having come to grief had been obliged to put her into service. Her presence in our household was the country air, the social life of a farm of fifty years ago transported into our midst by a sort of holiday journey in reverse whereby it is the countryside that comes to visit the traveller. As the glass cases in a local museum are filled with specimens of the curious handiwork which the peasants still carve or embroider in certain parts of the country, so our flat in Paris was decorated with the words of Françoise, inspired by a traditional and local sentiment and governed by extremely ancient laws. And she could trace her way back as though by clues of coloured thread to the birds and cherry trees of her childhood, to the bed in which her mother had died, and which she still saw. But in spite of all this wealth of background, once she had come to Paris and had entered our service she had acquired—as, a fortiori, anyone else would have done in her place—the ideas, the system of interpretation used by the servants on the other floors, compensating for the respect which she was obliged to show to us by repeating the rude words that the cook on the fourth floor had used to her mistress, with a servile gratification so intense that, for the first time in our lives, feeling a sort of solidarity with the detestable occupant of the fourth floor flat, we said to ourselves that possibly we too were employers after all. This alteration in Françoise’s character was perhaps inevitable. Certain ways of life are so abnormal that they are bound to produce certain characteristic faults; such was the life led by the King at Versailles among his courtiers, a life as strange as that of a Pharaoh or a Doge—and, far more even than his, the life of his courtiers. The life led by servants is probably of an even more monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing. But it was actually in details more intimate still that I should have been obliged, even if I had dismissed Françoise, to keep the same servant. For various others were to enter my service in the years to come; already endowed with the defects common to all servants, they underwent nevertheless a rapid transformation with me. As the laws of attack govern those of riposte, in order not to be worsted by the asperities of my character, all of them effected in their own an identical withdrawal, always at the same point, and to make up for this took advantage of the gaps in my line to thrust out advanced posts. Of these gaps I knew nothing, any more than of the salients to which they gave rise, precisely because they were gaps. But my servants, by gradually becoming spoiled, taught me of their existence. It was from the defects which they invariably acquired that I learned what were my own natural and invariable shortcomings; their character offered me a sort of negative of my own. We had always laughed, my mother and I, at Mme Sazerat, who used, in speaking of servants, to say “that race,” “that species.” But I am bound to admit that what made it useless to think of replacing Françoise by anyone else was that her successor would inevitably have belonged just as much to the race of servants in general and to the class of my servants in particular.

To return to Françoise, I never in my life experienced a humiliation without having seen beforehand on her face the signs of ready-made condolences, and when in my anger at the thought of being pitied by her I tried to pretend that on the contrary I had scored a distinct success, my lies broke feebly against the wall of her respectful but obvious unbelief and the consciousness that she enjoyed of her own infallibility. For she knew the truth. She refrained from uttering it, and made only a slight movement with her lips as if she still had her mouth full and was finishing a tasty morsel. She refrained from uttering it? So at least I long believed, for at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others. Indeed the words that people said to me recorded their meaning so unalterably on the sensitive plate of my mind that I could no more believe it possible that someone who had professed to love me did not love me than Françoise herself could have doubted when she had read in the paper that some priest or gentleman or other was prepared, on receipt of a stamped envelope, to furnish us free of charge with an infallible remedy for every known complaint or with the means of multiplying our income a hundredfold. (If, on the other hand, our doctor were to prescribe for her the simplest cure for a cold in the head, she, so stubborn to endure the keenest suffering, would complain bitterly of what she had been made to sniff, insisting that it tickled her nose and that life was not worth living.) But she was the first person to prove to me by her example (which I was not to understand until long afterwards, when it was given me afresh and more painfully, as will be seen in the later volumes of this work, by a person who was dearer to me) that the truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and that one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world. I might perhaps have suspected this, since it frequently occurred to me at that time to say things myself in which there was no vestige of truth, while I made the real truth plain by all manner of involuntary confidences expressed by my body and in my actions (which were only too accurately interpreted by Françoise); I ought perhaps to have suspected it, but to do so I should first have had to be conscious that I myself was occasionally mendacious and deceitful. Now mendacity and deceitfulness were with me, as with most people, called into being in so immediate, so contingent a fashion, in the defence of some particular interest, that my mind, fixed on some lofty ideal, allowed my character to set about those urgent, sordid tasks in the darkness below and did not look down to observe them.

When Françoise, in the evening, was nice to me, and asked my permission to sit in my room, it seemed to me that her face became transparent and that I could see the kindness and honesty that lay beneath. But Jupien, who had lapses into indiscretion of which I learned only later, revealed afterwards that she had told him that I was not worth the price of a rope to hang me, and that I had tried to do her every conceivable harm. These words of Jupien’s set up at once before my eyes, in new and strange colours, a print of my relations with Françoise so different from the one which I often took pleasure in contemplating and in which, without the least shadow of doubt, Françoise adored me and lost no opportunity of singing my praises, that I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones. However that might be, this sudden glimpse that Jupien afforded me of the real world appalled me. And yet it concerned only Françoise, about whom I cared little. Was it the same with all one’s social relations? And into what depths of despair might this not some day plunge me, if it were the same with love? That was the future’s secret. For the present only Françoise was concerned. Did she sincerely believe what she had said to Jupien? Had she said it to embroil Jupien with me, possibly so that we should not appoint Jupien’s girl as her successor? At any rate I realised the impossibility of obtaining any direct and certain knowledge of whether Françoise loved or hated me.