the spit one of those
chickens, such as she alone knew how to roast, chickens which had wafted
far abroad from Combray the sweet savour of her merits, and which, while
she was serving them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness
predominate for the moment in my private conception of her character;
the aroma of that cooked flesh, which she knew how to make so unctuous
and so tender, seeming to me no more than the proper perfume of one of
her many virtues.

But the day on which, while my father took counsel with his family upon
our strange meeting with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen, was one
of those days when Giotto's Charity, still very weak and ill after her
recent confinement, had been unable to rise from her bed; Francoise,
being without assistance, had fallen into arrears. When I went in, I saw
her in the back-kitchen which opened on to the courtyard, in process of
killing a chicken; by its desperate and quite natural resistance, which
Francoise, beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat
beneath the ear, accompanied with shrill cries of "Filthy creature!
Filthy creature!" it made the saintly kindness and unction of our
servant rather less prominent than it would do, next day at dinner, when
it made its appearance in a skin gold-embroidered like a chasuble, and
its precious juice was poured out drop by drop as from a pyx. When it
was dead Francoise mopped up its streaming blood, in which, however,
she did not let her rancour drown, for she gave vent to another burst
of rage, and, gazing down at the carcass of her enemy, uttered a final
"Filthy creature!"

I crept out of the kitchen and upstairs, trembling all over; I could
have prayed, then, for the instant dismissal of Francoise. But who
would have baked me such hot rolls, boiled me such fragrant coffee, and
even--roasted me such chickens? And, as it happened, everyone else had
already had to make the same cowardly reckoning. For my aunt Leonie knew
(though I was still in ignorance of this) that Francoise, who, for her
own daughter or for her nephews, would have given her life without a
murmur, shewed a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest
of the world. In spite of which my aunt still retained her, for, while
conscious of her cruelty, she could appreciate her services. I began
gradually to realise that Francoise's kindness, her compunction, the
sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedi