In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [213]
As for the actress, she left the house with Saint-Loup, exclaiming: “What do you mean by letting me in for those old hens, those uneducated bitches, those oafs? I don’t mind telling you, there wasn’t a man in the room who hadn’t leered at me or tried to paw me, and it was because I wouldn’t look at them that they were out to get their revenge.”
Words which had changed Robert’s antipathy for society people into a horror that was altogether more profound and distressing, and was provoked in him most of all by those who least deserved it, devoted kinsmen who, on behalf of the family, had sought to persuade his mistress to break with him, a move which she represented to him as inspired by their desire for her. Robert, although he had at once ceased to see them, used to imagine when he was separated from his mistress as he was now, that they or others like them were profiting by his absence to return to the charge and had possibly enjoyed her favours. And when he spoke of the lechers who betrayed their friends, who sought to corrupt women, tried to make them come to houses of assignation, his whole face radiated suffering and hatred.
“I’d kill them with less compunction than I’d kill a dog, which is at least a decent, honest and faithful beast. They’re the ones who deserve the guillotine if you like, far more than poor wretches who’ve been led into crime by poverty and by the cruelty of the rich.”
He spent the greater part of his time sending letters and telegrams to his mistress. Every time that, while still preventing him from returning to Paris, she found an excuse to quarrel with him by post, I read the news at once on his tormented face. Since she never told him in what way he was at fault, he suspected that she did not know herself, and had simply had enough of him; but he nevertheless longed for an explanation and would write to her: “Tell me what I’ve done wrong. I’m quite ready to acknowledge my faults,” the grief that overpowered him having the effect of persuading him that he had behaved badly.
But she kept him waiting indefinitely for answers which, when they came, were utterly meaningless. And so it was almost always with a furrowed brow and often empty-handed that I would see Saint-Loup returning from the post office, where, alone in all the hotel, he and Françoise went to fetch or to hand in letters, he from a lover’s impatience, she with a servant’s mistrust of others. (His telegrams obliged him to make a much longer journey.)
When, some days after our dinner with the Blochs, my grandmother told me with a joyful air that Saint-Loup had just asked her whether she would like him to take a photograph of her before he left Balbec, and when I saw that she had put on her nicest dress for the purpose and was hesitating between various hats, I felt a little annoyed at this childishness, which surprised me on her part. I even wondered whether I had not been mistaken in my grandmother, whether I did not put her on too lofty a pedestal, whether she was as unconcerned about her person as I had always supposed, whether she was entirely innocent of the weakness which I had always thought most alien to her, namely vanity.
Unfortunately, the displeasure that was aroused in me by the prospect of this photographic session, and more particularly by the delight with which my grandmother appeared to be looking forward to it, was sufficiently apparent for Françoise to notice it and to do her best, unintentionally, to increase