In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [211]
as Saint-Loup) or a young workman (electricians, for instance, must now be included in our truest order of Chivalry) her lover has too much admiration and respect for her not to extend them also to what she herself respects and admires; and for him the scale of values is thereby overturned. Her very sex makes her weak; she suffers from nervous troubles, inexplicable things which in a man, or even in another woman—an aunt or cousin of his—would bring a smile to the lips of this robust young man. But he cannot bear to see the woman he loves suffer. The young nobleman who, like Saint-Loup, has a mistress acquires the habit, when he takes her out to dine, of carrying in his pocket the valerian drops which she may need, of ordering the waiter, firmly and with no hint of sarcasm, to see that he shuts the doors quietly and does not put any damp moss on the table, so as to spare his companion those little ailments which he himself has never felt, which compose for him an occult world in whose reality she has taught him to believe, ailments for which he now feels sympathy without needing to understand them, for which he will still feel sympathy when women other than she are the sufferers. Saint-Loup’s mistress—as the first monks of the Middle Ages taught Christendom—had taught him to be kind to animals, for which she had a passion, never going anywhere without her dog, her canaries, her parrots; Saint-Loup looked after them with motherly devotion and regarded those who were unkind to animals as brutes. At the same time an actress, or so-called actress, like the woman who was living with him—whether she was intelligent or not, and as to that I had no knowledge—by making him find society women boring, and look upon having to go out to a party as a painful duty, had saved him from snobbishness and cured him of frivolity. Thanks to her, social relations filled a smaller place in the life of her young lover, but whereas, if he had been simply a man about town, vanity or self-interest would have dictated his choice of friends as rudeness would have characterised his treatment of them, his mistress had taught him to bring nobility and refinement into his friendships. With her feminine instinct, with a keener appreciation of certain qualities of sensibility in men which her lover might perhaps, without her guidance, have misunderstood and mocked, she had always been quick to distinguish from among the rest of Saint-Loup’s friends the one who had a real affection for him, and to make that one her favourite. She knew how to persuade him to feel grateful to that friend, to show his gratitude, to notice what things gave his friend pleasure and what pain. And presently Saint-Loup, without any more need for her to prompt him, began to think of these things by himself, and at Balbec, where she was not with him, for me whom she had never seen, whom he had perhaps not yet so much as mentioned in his letters to her, of his own accord would pull up the window of a carriage in which I was sitting, take out of the room the flowers that made me feel unwell, and when he had to say good-bye to several people at once would contrive to do so before it was actually time for him to go, so as to be left alone and last with me, to make that distinction between them and me, to treat me differently from the rest. His mistress had opened his mind to the invisible, had brought an element of seriousness into his life, of delicacy into his heart, but all this escaped his sorrowing family who repeated: “That creature will be the death of him, and meanwhile she’s doing what she can to disgrace him.”
It is true that he had already drawn from her all the good that she was capable of doing him; and that she now caused him only incessant suffering, for she had taken an intense dislike to him and tormented him in every possible way. She had begun, one fine day, to regard him as stupid and absurd because the friends that she had among the younger writers and actors had assured her that he was, and she duly repeated what they had said with that passion, that lack of reserve