Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

I thought that at my big light-wood table, watched by Françoise, who, in the way that all unpretentious people who live alongside us do, had an intuitive understanding of my task (and I had sufficiently forgotten Albertine to have forgiven Françoise for any harm she had done her), I would work next to her, and work almost in the same way as her (at least in the way she used to in the past: she was now so old she could hardly see at all); for, pinning a supplementary page in place here and there, I should construct my book, I don’t dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making. When I did not have all of what Françoise called my manuscribbles within reach, and could not find just the one that I wanted, Françoise would sympathize with my annoyance, as she always used to be saying how she could not sew if she did not have the right number thread and the proper buttons. And then through being so close to my life, she had developed a kind of instinctive understanding of literary work, more accurate than that of many intelligent people, let alone fools. Once, for example, when I had done my article for the Figaro, when the old butler, with the kind of commiseration which always slightly exaggerates the laborious nature of any alien task, like people who say: “How it must tire you to sneeze like that,” expressed his pity for writers by saying: “What a headache that must be,” Françoise, by contrast, sensed my happiness and respecte...