Page 108 - swanns-way

more particularly to my father, who had a fondness for such
things, a cream of chocolate, inspired in the mind, creat-
ed by the hand of Françoise, would be laid before us, light
and fleeting as an ‘occasional piece’ of music, into which she
had poured the whole of her talent. Anyone who refused to
partake of it, saying: ‘No, thank you, I have finished; I am
not hungry,’ would at once have been lowered to the level of
the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a present of
one of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas
what is of value is the creator’s intention and his signature.
To have left even the tiniest morsel in the dish would have
shewn as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert
hall while the ‘piece’ was still being played, and under the
composer’s-very eyes.
At length my mother would say to me: ‘Now, don’t stay
here all day; you can go up to your room if you are too hot
outside, but get a little fresh air first; don’t start reading im-
mediately after your food.’
And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its
trough, ornamented here and there, like a gothic font, with
a salamander, which modelled upon a background of crum-
bling stone the quick relief of its slender, allegorical body;
on the bench without a back, in the shade of a lilac-tree, in
that little corner of the garden which communicated, by a
service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose
neglected soil rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house
itself and apparently a separate building, my aunt’s back-
kitchen. One could see its red-tiled floor gleaming like
por-phyry. It seemed not so much the cave of Françoise as a

108 Swann’s Way