earlier; you know very
well it's Saturday."

The surprise of a 'barbarian' (for so we termed everyone who was not
acquainted with Saturday's special customs) who had called at eleven
o'clock to speak to my father, and had found us at table, was an event
which used to cause Francoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything
that had ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that the
nonplussed visitor should not have known, beforehand, that we had our
luncheon an hour earlier on Saturday, it was still more irresistibly
funny that my father himself (fully as she sympathised, from the bottom
of her heart, with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never
have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of so simple a
matter, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the
other's surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: "You see, it's
Saturday." On reaching this point in the story, Francoise would pause to
wipe the tears of merriment from her eyes, and then, to add to her own
enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply for
the visitor to whom the word 'Saturday' had conveyed nothing. And so far
from our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story
was not yet long enough, and would rally her with: "Oh, but surely he
said something else as well. There was more than that, the first time
you told it."

My great-aunt herself would lay aside her work, and raise her head and
look on at us over her glasses.

The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May
we used to go out on Saturday evenings after dinner to the 'Month of
Mary' devotions.

As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict
views on "the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to
be encouraged in these days," my mother would first see that there was
nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for
the church. It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember
having first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not
merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us
a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from
the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in
among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to
one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and
they were made