been prevented from writing; and do not we forget
to do so, feeling that this woman cannot attach much importance to a
silence which has none for ourselves? I imagined, like everyone else,
that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles
with no power of specific reaction to any stimulus which might be
applied to them; and I had not the least doubt that when I deposited in
the minds of my parents the news of the acquaintance I had made at my
uncle's I should at the same time transmit to them the kindly judgment
I myself had based on the introduction. Unfortunately my parents had
recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested
they should adopt when they came to form their estimate of my uncle's
conduct. My father and grandfather had 'words' with him of a violent
order; as I learned indirectly. A few days later, passing my uncle in
the street as he drove by in an open carriage, I felt at once all the
grief, the gratitude, the remorse which I should have liked to convey to
him. Beside the immensity of these emotions I considered that merely to
raise my hat to him would be incongruous and petty, and might make
him think that I regarded myself as bound to shew him no more than the
commonest form of courtesy. I decided to abstain from so inadequate a
gesture, and turned my head away. My uncle thought that, in doing so I
was obeying my parents' orders; he never forgave them; and though he
did not die until many years later, not one of us ever set eyes on him
again.

And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept
shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts
of the back-kitchen until Francoise appeared on its threshold and
announced: "I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take
up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," I would then
decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read.
The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution
to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and
continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human
shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the
same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such
quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress
them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when
we arrived at Combray