FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91  
92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   >>   >|  
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
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91  
92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

grocer

 

Eulalie

 
arrived
 

speaking

 

Goupil

 

Gilbert

 

inform

 

Instead

 

painter

 
church

window
 

telling

 

increased

 
anxiety
 
copying
 

vocabulary

 

turning

 
quality
 

starve

 
artist

nature

 
reaching
 
dispatched
 

person

 

limping

 

energetic

 
Bretonnerie
 

spinster

 

retired

 
absence

Theodore
 

profession

 

handed

 

Always

 

returned

 

choirman

 

encyclopaedic

 

society

 

knowledge

 
affairs

sections
 
relations
 

maintenance

 

fabric

 

assistant

 
Francoise
 

Legrandin

 

astonished

 

sister

 

married