In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [210]
In fact, Saint-Loup was obviously sincere and disinterested, and it was this intense moral purity which, unable to find entire satisfaction in a selfish emotion such as love, and moreover not finding in him the impossibility (which existed in me, for instance) of gaining spiritual nourishment elsewhere than in oneself, rendered him truly capable (to the extent that I was incapable) of friendship.
Françoise was no less mistaken about Saint-Loup when she said that he “just pretended” not to look down on the common people: you had only to see him when he was in a temper with his groom. It had indeed sometimes happened that Robert would scold his groom with a certain amount of brutality, which was proof in him of a sense not so much of the difference as of the equality between the classes. “But,” he said when I reproached him for having treated the man rather harshly, “why should I go out of my way to speak politely to him? Isn’t he my equal? Isn’t he just as near to me as any of my uncles and cousins? You seem to think I ought to treat him with respect, as an inferior. You talk like an aristocrat!” he added scornfully.
And indeed if there was a class to which he showed himself prejudiced and hostile, it was the aristocracy, so much so that he found it as hard to believe in the superior qualities of a man of the world as he found it easy to believe in those of a man of the people. When I mentioned the Princesse de Luxembourg, whom I had met with his aunt:
“An old trout,” was his comment. “Like all that lot. She’s a sort of cousin of mine, by the way.”
Having a strong prejudice against the people who frequented it, he went rarely into “society,” and the contemptuous or hostile attitude which he adopted towards it served to intensify, among all his closest relatives, the painful impression made by his liaison with a woman of the theatre, a liaison which, they declared, would be his ruin, blaming it specially for having bred in him that spirit of denigration, that rebelliousness, for having “led him astray,” until it was only a matter of time before he dropped out altogether. And so, many easy-going men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were without compunction when they spoke of Robert’s mistress. “Whores do their job,” they would say, “they’re as good as anybody else. But not that one! We can’t forgive her. She has done too much harm to a fellow we’re fond of.” Of course, he was not the first to be thus ensnared. But the others amused themselves like men of the world, continued to think like men of the world about politics and everything else. Whereas Saint-Loup’s family found him “soured.” They failed to realise that for many young men of fashion who would otherwise remain uncultivated mentally, rough in their friendships, without gentleness or taste, it is very often their mistresses who are their real masters, and liaisons of this sort the only school of ethics in which they are initiated into a superior culture, where they learn the value of disinterested relations. Even among the lower orders (who in point of coarseness so often remind us of high society) the woman, more sensitive, more fastidious, more leisured, is driven by curiosity to adopt certain refinements, respects certain beauties of sentiment and of art which, though she may not understand them, she nevertheless places above what has seemed most desirable to the man, above money or position. Now whether it concerns the mistress of a young blood (such