In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [161]
Robert swept me back to his mother.
“Good-bye,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t know when I shall get leave again. Probably not for a month. I shall write to you as soon as I know.”
Certainly Robert was not in the least the sort of son who, when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exasperation towards her ought to counterbalance the smiles and greetings which he bestows on strangers. Nothing is more prevalent than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear to believe that rudeness to one’s own family is the natural complement to ceremonial behaviour. Whatever the wretched mother may say, her son, as though he had been brought along against his will and wished to make her pay dearly for his presence, immediately refutes the timidly ventured assertion with a sarcastic, precise, cruel contradiction; the mother at once conforms, though without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior being whose delightful nature she will continue to vaunt to all and sundry in his absence, but who, for all that, spares her none of his most wounding remarks. Saint-Loup was not at all like this; but the anguish which Rachel’s absence provoked in him caused him for different reasons to be no less harsh with his mother than those other sons are with theirs. And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like the beating of a wing, which Mme de Marsantes had been unable to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole body once again; but this time it was an anxious face and woebegone eyes that she fastened on him.
“What, Robert, you’re going off? Seriously? My little son—the one day I had a chance to see something of you!”
And then quite softly, in the most natural tone, in a voice from which she strove to banish all sadness so as not to inspire her son with a pity which would perhaps have been painful to him, or else useless and simply calculated to irritate him, as a simple common-sense assertion she added: “You know it’s not at all nice of you.”
But to this simplicity she added so much timidity, to show him that she was not trespassing on his freedom, so much affection, so that he should not reproach her for interfering with his pleasures, that Saint-Loup could not help but observe in himself as it were the possibility of a similar wave of affection, in other words an obstacle to his spending the evening with his mistress. And so he reacted angrily: “It’s unfortunate, but, nice or not, that’s how it is.”
And he heaped on his mother the reproaches which no doubt he felt that he himself perhaps deserved; thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having posited at the start that their resolution is unshakeable, the more susceptible the feeling to which one appeals in them to make them abandon their resolution, the more reprehensible they find, not themselves who resist that appeal, but those who put them under the necessity of resisting it, so that their own harshness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty without having any effect in their eyes but to aggravate the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity. But of her own accord Mme de Marsantes ceased to pursue the matter, for she sensed that she would be unable to dissuade him.
“Well, I’m off,” he said to me, “but you’re not to keep him long, Mamma, because he’s got to go and pay a call elsewhere quite soon.”
I was fully aware that my company could not afford any pleasure to Mme de Marsantes, but I was glad not to give her the impression by leaving with Robert that I was involved in these pleasures which deprived her of him. I should have liked to find some excuse for her son’s conduct, less from affection for him than from pity for her. But it was she who spoke first: