speration
before the storm; without the least anxiety I could hear, at the far end
of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among our lilac-trees.

If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the idea of
a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit
of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards
Meseglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray
to settle the division of my aunt Leonie's estate; for she had died at
last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the
fact of her demise--those who had insisted that her mode of life was
enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had
always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary,
but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would
be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it;
causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that
one a grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my
aunt's last illness Francoise never went out of her room for an instant,
never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my
aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave.
Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Francoise
had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had
developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which
was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it
had been impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been
so hard to escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take
advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no
more. Compared with such a mistress we counted for very little. The
time had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays at
Combray, we had been of equal importance, in Franchise's eyes, with my
aunt.

During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with
the legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions with
solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it
happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them,
along the 'Meseglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid which
protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw
over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy