Page 106 - swanns-way

one of Eulalie’s most rooted beliefs, and one that the for-
midable list of corrections which her experience must have
compiled was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme. Saz-
erat’s name was really Mme. Sazerin.
‘I do not ask to live to a hundred,’ my aunt would say, for
she preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number
of her days.
And since, besides this, Eulalie knew, as no one else
knew, how to distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits,
which took place regularly every Sunday, unless something
unforeseen occurred to prevent them, were for my aunt a
pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those days in a
state of expectation, appetising enough to begin with, but at
once changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied
if Eulalie were a minute late in coming. For, if unduly pro-
longed, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture,
and my aunt would never cease from looking at the time, and
yawning, and complaining of each of her symptoms in turn.
Eulalie’s ring, if it sounded from the front door at the very
end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would
almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she
thought of nothing else than this visit, and the moment that
our luncheon was ended Françoise would become impatient
for us to leave the dining-room so that she might go upstairs
to ‘occupy’ my aunt. But—and this more than ever from the
day on which fine weather definitely set in at Combray—the
proud hour °f noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-
Hilaire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve
points of its sonorous crown, would long have echoed about

106 Swann’s Way