Page 178 - swanns-way

years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction
in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our
obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect,
the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the
right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weak-
ening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at her
charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.
Inasmuch as nothing of this sort had ever occurred, though
indeed she must often have pondered the success of such
a manœuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable
games of patience (and though it must have plunged her in
despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the
first of those little unforeseen facts, the first word of calami-
tous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged
from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint
of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logi-
cal abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from
time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imagining
other, minor catastrophes, which she would follow up with
passion. She would beguile herself with a sudden suspicion
that Françoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap
to make certain, and had caught her betrayer red-handed;
and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards
by herself, of playing her own and her adversary’s hands
at once, she would first stammer out Françoise’s awkward
apologies, and then reply to them with such a fiery indigna-
tion that any of us who happened to intrude upon her at one
of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her
eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the

178 Swann’s Way