which we show whenever we receive from without, and adopt as our own, opinions or customs of which we previously knew nothing. She readily professed, like her actor friends, that between Saint-Loup and herself there was an unbridgeable gulf, because they were of a different breed, because she was an intellectual and he, whatever he might claim, by birth an enemy of the intellect. This view of him seemed to her profound, and she sought confirmation of it in the most insignificant words, the most trivial actions of her lover. But when the same friends had further convinced her that she was destroying the great promise she had shown in company so ill-suited to her, that her lover’s influence would finally rub off on her, that by living with him she was ruining her future as an artist, to her contempt for Saint-Loup was added the sort of hatred that she would have felt for him if he had insisted upon inoculating her with a deadly germ. She saw him as seldom as possible, at the same time postponing a definite rupture, which seemed to me a highly improbable event. Saint-Loup made such sacrifices for her that unless she was ravishingly beautiful (but he had always refused to show me her photograph, saying: “For one thing, she’s not a beauty, and besides she always takes badly. They’re only some snapshots that I took myself with my Kodak; they would give you a false impression of her”) it seemed unlikely that she would find another man prepared to do the same. I never reflected that a fancy to make a name for oneself even when one has no talent, that the admiration, merely the privately expressed admiration, of people by whom one is impressed, can (although it may not perhaps have been the case with Saint-Loup’s mistress), even for a little prostitute, be motives more determining than the pleasure of making money. Without quite understanding what was going on in his mistress’s mind, Saint-Loup did not believe her to be completely sincere either in her unfair reproaches or in her promises of undying love, but nevertheless at certain moments had the feeling that she would break with him whenever she could, and accordingly, impelled no doubt by an instinctive desire to preserve his love that was perhaps more clear-sighted than he was himself, and incidentally bringing into play a practical capacity for business which was compatible in him with the loftiest and blindest impulses of the heart, had refused to settle any capital on her, had borrowed an enormous sum so that she should want nothing, but made it over to her only from day to day. And no doubt, assuming that she really did think of leaving him, she was calmly waiting until she had “feathered her nest,” a process which, with the money given her by Saint-Loup, would not perhaps take very long, but would all the same be an extra lease of time to prolong the happiness of my new friend—or his misery.
This dramatic period of their liaison—which had now reached its most acute, its cruellest state for Saint-Loup, for she had forbidden him to remain in Paris, where his presence exasperated her, and had forced him to spend his leave at Balbec, within easy reach of his regiment—had begun one evening at the house of one of his aunts, on whom he had prevailed to allow his mistress to come there, before a large party, to recite some fragments of a symbolist play in which she had once appeared in an avant-garde theatre, and for which she had brought him to share the admiration that she herself professed.
But when she appeared in the room, with a large lily in her hand, and wearing a costume copied from the Ancilla Domini which she had persuaded Saint-Loup was an absolute “vision of beauty,” her entrance had been greeted, in that assemblage of clubmen and duchesses, with smiles which the monotonous tone of her sing-song, the oddity of certain words and their frequent repetition, had changed into fits of giggles, stifled at first but presently so uncontrollable that the wretched reciter had been unable to go on. Next day Saint-Loup’s aunt had been universally censured for having allowed so