Environs

Before starting homewards we would sit there for a long time, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass over which came to us, faint, horizontal, but dense and metallic still, echoes of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had not melted into the air they had traversed for so long, and, ribbed by the successive palpitation of all their sound-waves, throbbed as they grazed the flowers at our feet.

We would come at length to the Mall, among whose tree-tops I could distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down and spend the whole day there reading and listening to the bells, for it was so blissful and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do, had simply—in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight—pressed, at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.

I found an additional merit in everything that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled roof, the grass growing out of the wall, the village of Roussainville into which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steeple of its church, as a result of this fresh emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, mysterious and propitious breeze.

But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and "by default." In a word, he was a snob.

In my heart of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books and pictures, and the light of the moon when the fresh breeze of your youth wafts to my nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes can no longer distinguish."

     "You admit yourself that he appears there at church quite simply dressed and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added that in any event, even if, assuming the worst, he had been intentionally rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, which are alone of importance in indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.

     Alas! We had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one of the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass drew to an end and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world, something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that Mme Goupil, Mme Percepied (everyone, in fact, who not so long before, when I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, engrossed in their prayers, and who I might even have thought oblivious of my entry had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little kneeling-bench which was preventing me from getting to my chair) had begun to discuss with us out loud all manner of utterly mundane topics as though we were already outside in the Square, we saw Legrandin on the sunbaked threshold of the porch dominating the many-coloured tumult of the market, being introduced by the husband of the lady we had seen him with on the previous occasion to the wife of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin’s face wore an expression of extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a deep bow, with a subsidiary backward movement which brought his shoulders sharply up into a position behind their starting-point, a gesture in which he must have been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme de Cambremer. This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin’s rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance, this wave lashed into a tempest by an obsequious alacrity of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew. The lady gave him some message for her coachman, and as he walked over to her carriage the impression of shy and respectful happiness which the introduction had stamped upon his face still lingered there. Rapt in a sort of dream, he smiled, then began to hurry back towards the lady; as he was walking faster than usual, his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; and altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, to the exclusion of all other considerations, as though he were the passive, wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile we were coming out through the porch and were about to pass close beside him; he was too well bred to turn his head away, but he fixed his eyes, which had suddenly changed to those of a seer lost in the profundity of his vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us and so had no need to acknowledge our presence. His face was as artless as ever above his plain, single-breasted jacket, which looked as though conscious of having been led astray and plunged willy-nilly into surroundings of detested splendour. And a spotted bow-tie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in front of Legrandin like the standard of his proud isolation and his noble independence. When we reached the house my mother discovered that the baker had forgotten to deliver the cream tart and asked my father to go back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met Legrandin coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations and affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chatelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.

     On leaving the church we would stay chatting for a moment with M. Vinteuil in front of the porch. Boys would be chasing one another in the Square, and he would intervene, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the big. If his daughter said in her gruff voice how glad she had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though a more sensitive sister within her had blushed at this thoughtless, schoolboyish utterance which might have made us think that she was angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain. As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, my father, in his thirst for glory, instead of taking us home at once would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my mother’s utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his strategic genius.

     “But what is unquestionably the most remarkable thing about our church is the view from the belfry, which is full of grandeur. Certainly in your case, since you are not very strong, I should never recommend you to climb our ninety-seven steps, just half the number they have in the famous cathedral at Milan. It’s quite tiring enough for the most active person, especially as you have to bend double if you don’t wish to crack your skull, and you collect all the cobwebs off the staircase on your clothes. In any case you should be well wrapped up,” he went on, without noticing my aunt’s indignation at the mere suggestion that she could ever be capable of climbing into his belfry, “for there’s a strong breeze there once you get to the top. Some people even assure me that they have felt the chill of death up there. However, on Sundays there are always clubs and societies who come, often from a long way off, to admire our beautiful panorama, and they always go home charmed. For instance, next Sunday, if the weather holds, you’ll be sure to find a lot of people there, for Rogation-tide. No doubt about it, the view from up there is entrancing, with what you might call vistas over the plain, which have quite a special charm of their own. On a clear day you can see as far as Verneuil. And another thing; you can see at the same time places which you normally see one without the other, as, for instance, the course of the Vivonne and the irrigation ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which are separated by a screen of tall trees, or again, the various canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte, which is Gaudiacus vice comitis, as of course you know. Each time I’ve been to Jouy I’ve seen a bit of canal in one place, and then I’ve turned a corner and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first. I tried to put them together in my mind’s eye; it was no good. But from the top of Saint-Hilaire it’s quite another matter—a regular network in which the place is enclosed. Only you can’t see any water; it’s as though there were great clefts slicing up the town so neatly that it looks like a loaf of bread which still holds together after it has been cut up. To get it all quite perfect you would have to be in both places at once; up at the top of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte.”

     "Heavens," said my aunt, slapping herself on the forehead, "that reminds me I never heard if she got to church this morning before the Elevation. I must remember to ask Eulalie... Françoise, just look at that black cloud behind the steeple, and how poor the light is on the slates. You may be certain it will rain before the day is out. It couldn't possibly go on like that, it's been too hot. And the sooner the better, for until the storm breaks my Vichy water won't go down," she added, since, in her mind, the desire to accelerate the digestion of her Vichy water was of infinitely greater importance than her fear of seeing Mme Goupil's new dress ruined.