Proust Moment, May 14, 2003

News of the World

Francoise is Aunt Leonie's connection to the world of Combray. The bedridden aunt observes the goings-on of the town from her window, then waits for Francoise to come up and attend to her so she can talk to her about whatever she has seen; if she gets impatient, she just rings incessantly.

Francoise is the perfect companion, more than happy to assess the day's mundane events. Why, it looks like Mme. Goupil is running late for church. Mme. Imbert was just seen carrying some fine stalks of asparagus; some discussion here as to where she got them. There's Dr. Piperaud moving steadily along the Rue de l'Oiseau; a child must be ill. The passing-bell just tolled; oh yes, Mme. Rousseau passed away the other night. "In this way Francoise and my aunt made a critical valuation between them, in the course of these morning sessions, of the earliest happenings of the day."

Combray is the kind of small town where each new day is pretty much like the last, and the smallest departure from routine is cause for mild alarm. Strangers in town are a particular source of news and interest; a young girl in the company of Mme. Goupil, for instance, suggests out of town visitors, who will probably be entertained with a mid-day luncheon, which Aunt Leonie, "who had renounced all earthly joys," will enjoy by proxy at the appointed hour. In Combray:

"... a person whom one 'didn't know at all' was as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and it was apt to be forgotten that after each occasion on which there had appeared in the Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenomena, careful and exhaustive researches had invariably reduced the fabulous monster to the proportions of a person whom one 'did know,' either personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to be Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbe Perdreau's niece come home from her convent, or the Cure's brother, a tax-collector at Chateaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holidays. 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 Cure had given warning that they expected 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 exclaim. `That's a likely story.' None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news, she would wish to have the details 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 happened to see a dog go by which she 'didn't know at all' she would think about it incessantly, devoting to the solution of the incomprehensible problem all her inductive talent and her leisure hours."


--"Combray," Swann's Way