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Mme. Sauton’s son discharged from the army, or the Abbé
Perdreau’s niece come home from her convent, or the Curé’s
brother, a tax-collector at Châteaudun, who had just retired
on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holi-
days. On first noticing them you have been impressed by
the thought that there might be in Combray people whom
you ‘didn’t know at all,’ simply because, you had failed to
recognise or identify them at once. And yet long beforehand
Mme. Sauton and the Curé had given warning that they ex-
pected their ‘strangers.’ In the evening, when I came in and
went upstairs to tell my aunt the incidents of our walk, if I
was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the
Pont-Vieux, a man whom my grandfather didn’t know:
‘A man grandfather didn’t know at all!’ she would ex-
claim. ‘That’s a likely story.’ None the less, she would be a
little disturbed by the news, she would wish to have the de-
tails correctly, and so my grandfather would be summoned.
‘Who can it have been that you passed near the Pont-Vieux,
uncle? A man you didn’t know at all?’
‘Why, of course I did,’ my grandfather would answer; ‘it
was Prosper, Mme. Bouilleboeuf’s gardener’s brother.’
‘Ah, well!’ my aunt would say, calm again but slightly
flushed still; ‘and the boy told me that you had passed a man
you didn’t know at all!’ After which I would be warned to
be more careful of what I said, and not to upset my aunt
so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known in
Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had hap-
pened to see a dog go by which she ‘didn’t know at all’ she
would think about it incessantly, devoting to the solution of

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