Page 121 - swanns-way

head away. My uncle thought that, in doing so I was obey-
ing my parents’ orders; he never forgave them; and though
he did not die until many years later, not one of us ever set
eyes on him again.
And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room
(now kept shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging
about on the outskirts of the back-kitchen until Françoise
appeared on its threshold and an-nounced: ‘I am going to
let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take up the hot wa-
ter; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave,’ I would then decide
to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to
read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a per-
manent institution to which an invariable set of attributes
assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity through-
out the long series of transitory human shapes in which that
personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl
there two years running. In the year in which we ate such
quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was
to dress them was a poor sickly creature, some way ‘gone’ in
pregnancy when we arrived at Com-bray for Easter, and it
was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so
many errands in the town and to do so much work in the
house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in bear-
ing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every
day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the
folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in
which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his
paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs.
He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he in-

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