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

by Marcel Proust

And then, the war having given conversational currency among the working class to a quantity of terms which they had come across only visually, from reading newspapers, and consequently did not know how to pronounce, the butler added: “I don’t know how everyone can be so stupid . . . Look at this, Françoise, they’re preparing a new attack using more battle-lions than ever before.” Unable to contain myself, if not in the name of pity for Françoise and strategic good sense, at least in the name of grammar, I told him that the proper pronunciation was “battalions,” but achieved nothing except to make him repeat the terrible phrase to Françoise every time I entered the kitchen, for the butler, almost as much as he enjoyed frightening his companion, enjoyed showing his master that, although he had once been a gardener at Combray and was still only a butler, he was nonetheless a good Frenchman according to the rule of Saint-André-des-Champs, and that the Declaration of the Rights of Man gave him a perfect independent right to pronounce it “battle-lion” if he wanted to, and not to let himself be ordered about on a matter that had nothing to do with his service, and on which consequently, since the Revolution, nobody had a right to say anything to him, as he was my equal. So I had the irritation of hearing him talk to Françoise about an operation using many “battle-lions” with an emphasis which was meant to show me that this pronunciation was the effect not of ignorance but of a m...