In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [167]
Often she was plagued with money troubles, and under pressure from a creditor would appeal to him for assistance. He was pleased by this, as he was pleased by anything that might impress Odette with his love for her, or merely with his influence, with the extent to which he could be of use to her. If anyone had said to him at the beginning, “It’s your position that attracts her,” or at this stage, “It’s your money that she’s really in love with,” he would probably not have believed the suggestion; nor, on the other hand, would he have been greatly distressed by the thought that people supposed her to be attached to him—that people felt them to be united—by ties so binding as those of snobbishness or wealth. But even if he had believed it to be true, it might not have caused him any suffering to discover that Odette’s love for him was based on a foundation more lasting than the charms or the qualities which she might see in him: namely, self-interest, a self-interest which would postpone for ever the fatal day when she might be tempted to bring their relations to an end. For the moment, by heaping presents on her, by doing her all manner of favours, he could fall back on advantages extraneous to his person, or to his intellect, as a relief from the endless, killing effort to make himself attractive to her. And the pleasure of being a lover, of living by love alone, the reality of which he was sometimes inclined to doubt, was enhanced in his eyes, as a dilettante of intangible sensations, by the price he was paying for it—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable become convinced that they are—and convinced also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own taste—when they have agreed to pay several pounds a day for a room in an hotel from which that sight and that sound may be enjoyed.
One day, when reflections of this sort had brought him back to the memory of the time when someone had spoken to him of Odette as of a kept woman, and he was amusing himself once again with contrasting that strange personification, the kept woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers interwoven with precious jewels—with the Odette on whose face he had seen the same expressions of pity for a sufferer, revolt against an, act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness, which he had seen in earlier days on his own mother’s face and on the faces of his friends, the Odette whose conversation so frequently turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his collections, his room, his old servant, the banker who kept all his securities, it happened that the thought of the banker reminded him that he must call on him shortly to draw some money. The fact was that if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for his generosity, her heart-warming gratitude, to decline, and would even run the risk of giving her to believe that his love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow smaller) had itself diminished. And then, suddenly, he wondered whether that was