her alone found fault with him for
speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not using
a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Lavalliere neckties, his
short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was astonished, too, at
the furious invective which he was always launching at the aristocracy,
at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'--"undoubtedly," he would say,
"the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of the sin for
which there is no forgiveness."

Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable
of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to
apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in not
very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country
gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such
violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution
for not having guillotined them all.

"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are
lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris,
to squeeze back into my niche.

"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical,
disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in
my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great
patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above
your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in
you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of
what it needs."

When, on our reaching the house, my aunt would send to ask us whether
Mme. Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us could inform
her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that there was
a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the
Bad. Francoise was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned
empty-handed owing to the absence of Theodore, whose dual profession of
choirman, with a part in the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's
assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but
an encyclopaedic knowledge of their affairs.

"Ah!" my aunt would sigh, "I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She
is really the only person who will be able to tell me."

Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had 'retired' after
the death of Mme. de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in ser