Marcel Proust: A Biography

18 MARCEL PROUST
Elisabeth, and never forgot that coffee and hot-water bottles
should always be 'not just hot, but boiling'. "It's amazing how
intelligent that girl is, and how well she understands things,"
Mme Proust would say. But she kept to herself the management
of the other servants and all direct communication with her
employers; if she was all smiles in the dining-room, in the kitchen
she was merciless and treacherous to her unhappy inferiors. The
other servants never stayed long; some left at the end of the first
month, and only the bravest and most industrious could endure
for as long as a year. Marcel observed her cruelty to the kitchen-
maid with indignation and pity, which were tempered not only
by his appreciation of her cooking, but by a secret complicity: it
was the child's first sight of sadism, of the nerve of evil which
runs, whether we are conscious of it or not, through all mankind,
including ourselves, and which had been planted in him, once and
for all, by his anger against his mother. Ernestine's talk was full
of old words and turns of speech, which later he met again in
Moliere or Saint-Simon; her face had qualities of nobility and
courage, credulity and cunning, which he recognised in the scnlp-
tures of Chartres or the porch of the imaginary Saint-Andre-des-
Champs near Combray. She became for him a symbol of a bygone
France, 'a mediaeval peasant who had survived to cook for us in
the nineteenth century',l with a pedigree as ancient as that of any
Guermantes. She was the first of a long line of family servants who
together merged into Fran~oise; and her mistress, almost without
modification, became Aunt Leonie.
The door of Ernestine's kitchen, 'a miniature temple of Venus
overflowing with the offerings of the milkman and the green-
grocer', opened on a little garden which was more like a court-
yard, since most of it was paved, though space was found for a
tiny lawn, a flower-bed of pansies and a chestnut-tree. There was
no room here for Marcel's grandmother Weil to walk in the wind
and rain, as she did in his novel, while her wicked relatives indoors
tempted her husband to drink a glass of brandy; indeed, it is un-
likely that she ever visited IIIiers, and the scene of these events
was certainly Uncle Louis Weil's more spacious garden at
Auteuil. But here at lIliers, too, the family would sit with their
liqueurs after dinner, on the cane garden-chairs at the iron
garden-table; there was a family friend who would call, like
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