Proust Moment, May 1, 2003

Francoise as Backstage Bouncer

Crude title? Well, if Marcel is going to take this drama to extremes, there's no reason I shouldn't. He's now a little boy who can't crash to rear gate to see his ma, fancying himself this time less like Swann than some spoiled girl:

"My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made Francoise tell me, in so many words `There is no answer'—words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in 'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: `What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer.' And just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Francoise's offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden."

--"Overture," Swann's Way