impid hours.

Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon,
by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing,
overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a
tooth, and screaming out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that
Francoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That
was on days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went out for some
military exercise, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While
our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden
railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walks and
were stared at in return, the gardener's daughter, through the gap which
there was between two houses far away in the Avenue de la Gare, would
have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants then hurried in
with their chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling
horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and drowning
the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river
in flood.

"Poor children," Francoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she
had reached the railings; "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a
meadow. It's just shocking to think of," she would go on, laying a hand
over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.

"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Francoise, all these young fellows not
caring two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to
'draw' her. And he would not have spoken in vain.

"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that
we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never
offers us a second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same;
it's quite true, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those
wretched wars they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing
more nor less than madmen; and then they aren't worth the price of a
rope to hang them with; they're not men any more, they're lions." For
by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to
pronounce 'lie-on,' was not at all complimentary to the man.

The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still
make out fresh helmets racing along towar