Page 236 - swanns-way

could watch the poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying
for mercy, bowing in desperation before the storm; without
the least anxiety I could hear, at the far end of the garden,
the last peals of thunder growling among our lilac-trees.
If the weather was bad all morning, my family would
abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home.
But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on
such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, dur-
ing that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle
the division of my aunt Léonie’s estate; for she had died at
last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant
in the fact of her demise—those who had insisted that her
mode of life was enfeebling and must ultimately kill her,
and, equally, those who had always maintained that she suf-
fered from some disease not imaginary, but organic, by the
visible proof of which the most sceptical would be obliged
to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to
it; causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors,
but to that one a grief savage in its violence. During the long
fortnight of my aunt’s last illness Françoise never went out
of her room for an instant, never took off her clothes, al-
lowed no one else to do anything for my aunt, and did not
leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then, at last,
we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise
had lived of my aunt’s harsh words, her suspicions and her
anger, had developed in her a sentiment which we had mis-
taken for hatred, and which was really veneration and love.
Her true mistress, whose decisions it had been impossible
to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been so hard to

236 Swann’s Way