tartan
scandalised Francoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the
colour of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning
for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the
neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone
when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I
am sure that in a book--and to that extent my feelings were closely akin
to those of Francoise--such a conception of mourning, in the manner
of the _Chanson de Roland_ and of the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs,
would have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Francoise herself
approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry,
and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I
regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of
her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that
she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her
death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a
book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.

And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused
reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to
plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to
_espress_ myself"--I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal
common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same
she was a _geological_ relation; there is always the respect due to your
_geology_," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good
of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot
speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise,
the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most
contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too
prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage
of life.

My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used
to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of
reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid
across my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of
enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was
now obliged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in
every directi