Page 237 - swanns-way

escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take
advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent
monarch was no more. Compared with such a mistress
we counted for very little. The time had long passed when,
on our first coming to spend our holidays at Combray, we
had been of equal importance, in Franchise’s eyes, with my
aunt.
During that autumn my parents, finding the days so ful-
ly occupied with the legal formalities that had to be gone
through, and discussions with solicitors and farmers, that
they had little time for walks which, as it happened, the
weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them,
along the ‘Méséglise way,’ wrapped up in a huge Highland
plaid which protected me from the rain, and which I was
all the more ready to throw over my shoulders because I felt
that the stripes of its gaudy tartan scandalised Françoise,
whom it was impossible to convince that the colour of one’s
clothes had nothing whatever to do with one’s mourning
for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn
on my aunt’s death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had
not entertained the neighbours to a great funeral banquet,
and did not adopt a special tone when we spoke of her, while
I at times might be heard humming a tune. I am sure that
in a book—and to that extent my feelings were closely akin
to those of Françoise—such a conception of mourning, in
the manner of the Chanson de Roland and of the porch of
Saint-André-des-Champs, would have seemed most attrac-
tive. But the moment that Françoise herself approached,
some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her an-

237