ctacle. "And it will come in the middle of
my luncheon!" she would murmur to herself. Her luncheon was such a
distraction in itself that she did not like any other to come at the
same time. "At least, you will not forget to give me my creamed eggs on
one of the flat plates?" These were the only plates which had pictures
on them and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the
description on whichever might have been sent up to her. She would
put on her spectacles and spell out: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,"
"Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," and smile, and say "Very good indeed."

"I may as well go across to Camus..." Francoise would hazard, seeing
that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.

"No, no; it's not worth while now; it's certain to be the Pupin girl. My
poor Francoise, I am sorry to have made you come upstairs for nothing."

But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for
Francoise, since at 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