Chapter One

The early-morning twitter of the birds sounded tame to Frangoise. Every word from the maids' quarters made her jump; their every footstep bothered her, and she was constantly wondering what they were doing. All this was because we had moved. It is true that the servants in our former home had made quite as much stir in their quarters on the top floor, but they were servants she knew, and their comings and goings had become friendly presences to her. Now she even made silence the object of her painful scrutiny. And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing in the street as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Frangoise. And if I had made fun of her when she had been distressed at leaving an apartment building where we had been "so well thought of by everybody," weeping as she packed her trunks in accordance with the rituals of Combray and declaring that our former home was superior to any other imaginable, I, who found it as difficult to assimilate new surroundings as I found it easy to abandon old ones, nonetheless felt a close sympathy with our old servant when I realized that the move to a building where the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits had driven her to a state close to total decline. She alone could understand my feelings; this was certainly not the case with her young footman; for him, a person as remote from the Combray world as it was possible to be, moving int...