Page 188 - swanns-way

aid’ to be adopted. My mother sent Françoise to fetch the
book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour
elapsed, and Françoise had not returned; my mother, sup-
posing that she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told
me to go myself to the bookcase and fetch the volume. I did
so, and there found Françoise who, in her curiosity to know
what the marker indicated, had begun to read the clinical
account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing, now
that it was a question of a type of illness with which she was
not familiar. At each painful symptom mentioned by the
writer she would exclaim: ‘Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible
that God wishes any wretched human creature to suffer so?
Oh, the poor girl!’
But when I had called her, and she had returned to the
bedside of Giotto’s Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow;
she could find no stimulus for that pleasant sensation of
tenderness and pity which she very well knew, having been
moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers; nor
any other pleasure of the same kind in her sense of weariness
and irritation at being pulled out of bed in the middle of the
night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very
sufferings, the printed account of which had moved her to
tears, she had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mutterings,
mingled with bitter sarcasm, saying, when she thought that
we had gone out of earshot: ‘Well, she need never have done
what she must have done to bring all this about! She found
that pleasant enough, I dare say! She had better not put on
any airs now. All the same, he must have been a god-forsak-
en young man to go after that. Dear, dear, it’s just as they

188 Swann’s Way