And Françoise, after a modest, evasive signal of delight, the meaning of which was, more or less: “Tastes differ, you know; simplicity’s the rule in this house,” shut the window again in case Mamma should come in. These “you” who might have had more horses than the Guermantes were ourselves, but Jupien was right in saying “you” since, except for a few purely personal gratifications, such as, when she coughed all day long without ceasing and everyone in the house was afraid of catching her cold, that of pretending, with an irritating little titter, that she had not got a cold, like those plants that an animal to which they are wholly attached keeps alive with food which it catches, eats and digests for them and of which it offers them the ultimate and easily assimilable residue, Françoise lived with us in full community; it was we who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, must take on ourselves the task of concocting those little sops to her vanity out of which was formed—with the addition of the recognised rights of freely practising the cult of the midday dinner according to the traditional custom, which included a mouthful of air at the window when the meal was finished, a certain amount of loitering in the street when she went out to do her marketing, and a holiday on Sundays when she paid a visit to her niece—the portion of happiness indispensable to her existence. And so it can be understood that Françoise might well have succumbed in those first days of our migration, a victim, in a house where my father’s claims to distinction were not yet known, to a malady which she herself called “wearying”, wearying in the active sense in which the word _ennui_ is employed by Corneille, or in the last letters of soldiers who end by taking their own lives because they are wearying for their girls or for their native villages. Françoise’s wearying had soon been cured by none other than Jupien, for he at once procured her a pleasure no less keen, indeed more refined than she would have felt if we had decided to keep a carriage. “Very good class, those Juliens,” (for Françoise readily assimilated new names to those with which she was already familiar) “very worthy people; you can see it written on their faces.” Jupien was in fact able to understand, and to inform the world that if we did not keep a carriage it was because we had no wish for one. This new friend of Françoise was very little at home, having obtained a post in one of the Government offices. A waistcoat-maker first of all, with the “chit of a girl” whom my grandmother had taken for his daughter, he had lost all interest in the exercise of that calling after his assistant (who, when still little more than a child, had shewn great skill in darning a torn skirt, that day when my grandmother had gone to call on Mme. de Villeparisis) had turned to ladies’ fashions and become a seamstress. A prentice hand, to begin with, in a dressmaker’s workroom, set to stitch a seam, to fasten a