Swann’s Way, paragraph 28, part 2
My fear was that Françoise, my aunt’s cook, who was charged with my care when I was at Combray, would refuse to deliver my note. I suspected that for her, to run an errand to my mother when guests were present would seem as impossible as for the usher in a theater to deliver a letter to an actor mid-scene. When it came to things “done” or “not done,” Françoise possessed an imperious, extensive, subtle code, unyielding over elusive or baseless distinctions (which made it seem like those ancient laws that—alongside brutal punishments like the massacre of suckling infants—prohibit with exaggerated delicacy boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk, or eating the tendon from an animal’s thigh).