In Search of Lost Time Vol.1: Françoise and asparagus

The narrator writes of his aunt’s maid/ cook Françoise: 

“I came to recognise that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.” (Vol.1, P.1) 

Who does that sound like? Yep, Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle in Bleak House (except that Dickens’s characters make no exception for their own kinsfolk).

If we have to categorise characters as caricatures (for lack of a better term) or realistic, complex, lifelike characters, everyone would put Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle in the first group and Françoise in the second. Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle are caricatures because the characterisation is exaggerated, because these characters have one facet, because they don’t change and don’t surprise us. This doesn’t mean that Mrs Pardiggle and Mrs Jellyby are failures—they have a vivid existence and are unforgettable. This also doesn’t mean that Dickens is incapable of creating complex and realistic characters as his detractors like to say—in Bleak House for example, Esther Summerson or Lady Dedlock is rounded and complex; Dickens may also write a character like a two-dimensional one then give him depth later on, turning him three-dimensional, such as Sir Leicester. 

Françoise would be seen as lifelike and realistic because there are different sides to her character, because she surprises us as we learn more and more about her. 

Françoise, when Proust first introduces her to us, is a kind, patient, and devoted servant. A great cook. A servant who well understands her mistress and puts up with her difficult demands and eccentricities. 

Then the narrator writes of the mutual hatred of Françoise and the aunt’s friend Eulalie: 

“… Françoise would sigh grimly, for she had a tendency to regard as petty cash all that my aunt might give her for herself or her children, and as treasure riotously squandered on an ungrateful wretch the little coins slipped Sunday after Sunday into Eulalie’s hand, but so discreetly that Françoise never managed to see them.” (ibid.) 

Françoise appears different: 

“… She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such persons, not being actually in need of my aunt’s presents, could not be suspected of simulating affection for her on that account. Besides, presents offered to persons of great wealth and position, such as Mme Sazerat, M. Swann, M. Legrandin and Mme Goupil, to persons of the “same rank” as my aunt, and who would naturally “mix with her,” seemed to Françoise to be included among the ornamental customs of that strange and brilliant life led by rich people, who hunt and shoot and give balls and pay each other visits, a life which she would contemplate with an admiring smile. But it was by no means the same thing if the beneficiaries of my aunt’s generosity were of the class whom Françoise would label “folk like me” or “folk no better than me” and who were those she most despised, unless they called her “Madame Françoise” and considered themselves her inferiors.” (ibid.) 

Psychologically, Proust is brilliant. Some time later, Proust again makes us see the character differently:   

“[Aunt Léonie] would beguile herself with a sudden pretence that Françoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer red-handed […]. Sometimes, however, even these counterpane dramas would not satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged.” (ibid.)

As aunt Léonie, believing herself to be ill and weak, confines herself in the rooms and goes nowhere, she makes up drama and imagines Françoise and Eulalie plotting on her. But if the suspicions she has about Eulalie are “no more than a flash in the pan that soon subsided for lack of fuel”, because Eulalie doesn’t live in the same house, she focuses her energy and paranoia on Françoise, seeming “to find a cruel satisfaction in driving deep into her unhappy servant’s heart”. 

“My mother was afraid lest Françoise should develop a genuine hatred of my aunt, who did everything in her power to hurt her. However that might be, Françoise had come, more and more, to pay an infinitely scrupulous attention to my aunt’s least word and gesture.” (ibid.) 

Both characters now appear in a different light: the pathetic aunt has a cruel streak in her, and Françoise becomes more sympathetic. 

But that isn’t all. Proust drops more and more details, and lets the characters unfold. Françoise again changes, as we see in the passage at the beginning of this blog post: she is unkind. 

“One night, shortly after her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized with the most appalling pains; Mamma heard her groans, and rose and awakened Françoise, who, quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that the girl wanted to “play the mistress.” The doctor, who had been afraid of some such attack, had left a marker in a medical dictionary which we had, at the page on which the symptoms were described, and had told us to turn up this passage to discover the first aid to be adopted. My mother sent Françoise to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour elapsed, and Françoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me to go myself to the library and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found Françoise who, in her curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read the clinical account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing, now that it was a question of a prototype patient with whom she was unacquainted. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would exclaim: “Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes a wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!”

But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of Giotto’s Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity with which she was familiar, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers, nor any other pleasure of the same kind, in her boredom and irritation at being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very sufferings the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she relapsed into ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter sarcasm…” (ibid.) 

Giotto’s Charity is the nickname of the pregnant kitchen maid. 

Forget everything else and look at that passage alone, does it not sound exaggerated? Does Françoise not, in this passage, seem like a caricature? 

To get back to what I was saying, Proust lets his characters unfold and makes us view them differently over time. His characters feel like real people. I have no doubt that Françoise would continue to unfold, and to change.

Even more interesting is the way Proust writes about the asparagus, and makes us view it differently. 

When the asparagus is first mentioned in Swann’s Way, it is comic—the mistress and the servant talk about a neighbour’s asparagus—we’re told that Françoise has been cooking everything with asparagus and it seems to be one of those details which enrich the novel and give life to things but have no significance. 

Later on, Proust transforms asparagus into something magical and poetic: 

“… what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare’s fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.” (ibid.) 

Does that passage not make you see asparagus—not just in the novel but also in real life—differently? 

But some time later, the narrator reveals the truth about the asparagus: 

“… in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister to her unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of stratagems so cunning and so pitiless that, many years later, we discovered that if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that summer, it was because their smell gave the poor kitchen-maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt’s service.” (ibid.) 

That changes everything. 

Proust is a wonderful writer.