Page 238 - swanns-way

gry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to
her that I regretted my aunt’s death because she had been a
good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least
because she was my aunt; that she might easily have been
my aunt and yet have been so odious that her death would
not have caused me a moment’s sorrow; statements which,
in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood
of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family
memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories,
saying: ‘I don’t know how to espress myself’—I would tri-
umph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense
worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: ‘All the same
she was a geological relation; there is always the respect due
to your geology,’ I would shrug my shoulders and say: ‘It
is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an il-
literate old woman who cannot speak her own language,’
adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise, the mean and
narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most
contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds
are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a
part upon the vulgar stage of life.
My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful
because I used to take them after long hours spent over a
book. When I was tired of reading, after a whole morning
in the house, I would throw my plaid across my shoulders
and set out; my body, which in a long spell of enforced im-
mobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was
now obliged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend

238 Swann’s Way