But my
grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely
with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be
discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And even what
in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a manner to
which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as one of those
old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose
fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue. In
precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was
giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture,
full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery,
such as one finds now only in country dialects. And my grandmother had
bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred
to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of
antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a
nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.
Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen _Francois le Champi_, whose
reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality in
my eyes and a mysterious attraction.
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