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before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed
there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the
rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and
attempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prison-
er. I wrote to my mother begging her to come upstairs for
an important reason which I could not put in writing. My
fear was that Françoise, my aunt’s cook who used to be put
in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to
take my note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry
a message to my mother when there was a stranger in the
room would appear flatly inconceivable, just as it would be
for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an ac-
tor upon the stage. For things which might or might not
be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant,
subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imper-
ceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those
ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the
massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions, of exag-
gerated refinement, against ‘seething the kid in his mother’s
milk,’ or ‘eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of
the thigh.’ This code, if one could judge it by the sudden
obstinacy which she would put into her refusal to carry out
certain of our instructions, seemed to have foreseen such
social complications and refinements of fashion as nothing
in Françoise’s surroundings or in her career as a servant in
a village household could have put into her head; and we
were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some
past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and
little understood, just as there is in those manufactur-

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