weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Francoise had
rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not
get soaked--you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden,
lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her
brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and
rain. She would say, "At last one can breathe!" and would run up and down
the soaking paths--too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to
the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had
been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve--with her
keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her
soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity
of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety
(for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from
the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which
always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh
despair.

When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was one
thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if (at
one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her,
moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs
were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her:
"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For,
simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my
father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to
make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My
poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to
taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops
all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still
smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards