In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

tonight anyway.’ And my father, who was not as scrupulous as my grandmother and my mother about honouring treaties, said: ‘Yes, go on now, up to bed with you.’ I tried to kiss Mama, at that moment we heard the dinner-bell. ‘No, really, leave your mother alone, you’ve already said goodnight to each other as it is, these demonstrations are ridiculous. Go on now, upstairs!’ And I had to leave without my viaticum; I had to climb each step of the staircase, as the popular expression has it, ‘against my heart’, 20 climbing against my heart which wanted to go back to my mother because she had not, by kissing me, given it licence to go with me. That detested staircase which I always entered with such gloom exhaled an odour of varnish that had in some sense absorbed, fixated, the particular sort of sorrow I felt every evening and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it took that olfactory form, my intelligence could no longer share in it. When we are asleep and a raging toothache is as yet perceived by us only in the form of a girl whom we attempt two hundred times in a row to pull out of the water or a line by Molière that we repeat to ourselves incessantly, it is a great relief to wake up so that our intelligence can divest the idea of raging toothache of its disguise of heroism or cadence. It was the opposite of this relief that I experienced when my sorrow at going up to my room entered me in a manner infinitely swifter, almost instantaneous, at once insidious and abrupt, through the inhalation – far more toxic than the intellectual penetration – of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase. Once in my room, I had to stop up all the exits, close the shutters, dig my own grave by undoing my covers, put on the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which they had added to the room because I was too hot in the summer under the rep curtains of the big bed, I had a fit of rebelliousness, I wanted to attempt the ruse of a condemned man. I wrote to my mother begging her to come upstairs for something serious that I could not tell her in my letter. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt’s cook who was charged with looking after me when I was at Combray, would refuse to take my note. I suspected that, for her, delivering a message to my motherwhen there was company would seem as impossible as for a theatre porter to hand a letter to an actor while he was on stage. With respect to things that could or could not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, extensive, subtle and intransigent about distinctions that were impalpable or otiose (which made it resemble those ancient laws which, alongside such fierce prescriptions as the massacre of children at the breast, forbid one with an exaggerated delicacy to boil a kid in its mother’s milk, or to eat the sinew from an animal’s thigh). This code, to judge from her sudden obstinacy when she did not wish to do certain errands that we gave her, seemed to have anticipated social complexities and worldly refinements such that nothing in Françoise’s associations or her life as a village domestic could have suggested them to her; and we had to say to ourselves that in her there was a very old French past, noble and ill understood, as in those manufacturing towns where elegant old houses testify that there was once a court life, and where the employees of a factory for chemical products work surrounded by delicate sculptures representing the miracle of Saint Théophile or the four sons of Aymon. 21 In this particular case, the article of the code which made it unlikely that except in case of fire Françoise would go and bother Mama in the presence of M. Swann for so small a personage as myself simply asserted the respect she professed not only for the family – as for the dead, for priests and for kings – but also for the visitor to whom one was