Page 187 - swanns-way

ready had to make the same cowardly reckoning. For my
aunt Léonie knew (though I was still in ignorance of this)
that Françoise, who, for her own daughter or for her neph-
ews, would have given her life without a murmur, shewed
a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest of the
world. In spite of which my aunt still retained her, for, while
conscious of her cruelty, she could appreciate her services.
I began gradually to realise that Françoise’s kindness, her
compunction, the sum total of her virtues concealed many
of these back-kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us
that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed
as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches,
were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I had taken note
of the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings
of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct
ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.
The tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read
of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspa-
per, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form
a more accurate mental picture of the victims. One night,
shortly after her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized
with the most appalling pains; Mamma heard her groans,
and rose and awakened Françoise, who, quite unmoved, de-
clared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that the
girl wanted to ‘play the mistress’ in the house. The doctor,
who had been afraid of some such attack, had left a marker
in a medical dictionary which we had, at the page on which
the symptoms were described, and had told us to turn up
this passage, where we would find the measures of ‘first

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