marcel proust

marcel proust


https://yadi.sk/d/Fwdi8C7Dpz2gh



At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of
lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as pharmacy
and as high altar, on which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a
bottle of Vichy-Célestins, might be found her service-books and
her medical prescriptions, everything that she needed for the
performance, in bed, of her duties to soul and body, to keep the
proper times for pepsin and for vespers. On the other side her
bed was bounded by the window: she had the street beneath
her eyes, and would read in it from morning to night to divert
the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily but immemorial
chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail
afterwards with Françoise.
I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she
would send me away in case I made her tired. She would hold
out for me to kiss her sad brow, pale and lifeless, on which at
this early hour she would not yet have arranged the false hair
and through which the bones shone like the points of a crown
of thorns—or the beads of a rosary, and she would say to me:
"Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for
mass; and if you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay
too long amusing herself with you; she must come up soon to
see if I want anything."
Françoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service
and did not at that time suspect that she would one day be
transferred entirely to ours, was a little inclined to desert my
aunt during the months which we spent in her house. There
had been in my infancy, before we first went to Combray, and
when my aunt Léonie used still to spend the winter in Paris
with her mother, a time when I knew Françoise so little that on
New Year's Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my
mother put a five-franc piece in my hand and said: "Now, be
careful. Don't make any mistake.