In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [162]
“Poor boy,” she began, “I’m sure I must have hurt him dreadfully. You see, Monsieur, mothers are such selfish creatures. After all, he hasn’t many pleasures, he comes so seldom to Paris. Oh, dear, if he hadn’t gone already I should have liked to stop him, not to keep him of course, but just to tell him that I’m not vexed with him, that I think he was quite right. Will you excuse me if I go and look over the staircase?”
I accompanied her there.
“Robert! Robert!” she called. “No, he’s gone. It’s too late.”
At that moment I would as gladly have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as, a few hours earlier, to make him go and live with her altogether. In the one case Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet I was the same man at an interval of a few hours.
We returned to the drawing-room. Seeing that Saint-Loup was not with us, Mme de Villeparisis exchanged with M. de Norpois one of those sceptical, mocking and not too compassionate glances with which people point out to one another an over-jealous wife or an over-fond mother (traditional laughing-stocks), as much as to say: “Well, well, there’s been trouble.”
Robert went to his mistress, taking with him the splendid ornament which, after what had passed between them, he ought not to have given her. But it came to the same thing, for she would not look at it, and even subsequently he could never persuade her to accept it. Certain of Robert’s friends thought that these proofs of disinterestedness were deliberately calculated to bind him to her. And yet she was not greedy for money, except perhaps in order to be able to spend it freely. I often saw her lavish on people whom she believed to be in need the most extravagant largesse. “At this moment,” Robert’s friends would say to him, seeking to invalidate by their malicious words a disinterested action on Rachel’s part, “at this moment she’ll be in the promenade at the Folies-Bergère. She’s an enigma, that Rachel, a regular sphinx.” In any case, how many mercenary women, women who are kept by men, does one not see setting countless little limits to the generosity of their lovers out of a delicacy that flowers in the midst of that sordid existence!
Robert was ignorant of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, and tormented himself over what were mere nothings compared with the real life of Rachel, a life which began every day only after he had left her. He was ignorant of almost all these infidelities. One could have told him of them without shaking his confidence in Rachel. For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love. On the one hand the lover says to himself: “She is an angel, she will never give herself to me, I may as well die—and yet she loves me; she loves me so much that perhaps . . . but no, it can never possibly happen.” And in the exaltation of his desire, in the anguish of his expectation, what jewels he flings at the feet of this woman, how he runs to borrow money to save her from financial worries! Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass screen, through which these conversations will no more carry than those which visitors exchange in front of an aquarium in a zoo, the public are saying: “You don’t know her? You can count yourself lucky—she has robbed, in fact ruined, I don’t know how many men, as girls go there’s nothing worse. She’s a swindler pure and simple. And crafty!” And perhaps this last epithet is not absolutely wrong, for even the sceptical man who is not really in love with the woman, who merely gets pleasure from her, says to his friends: “No, no, my dear fellow, she’s not at all a whore. I don’t say she hasn’t had an adventure or two in her time, but she’s not a woman one pays, she’d be a damned sight too expensive if she was. With her it’s fifty thousand francs or nothing.” The fact of the matter is that he himself has spent fifty thousand francs for the privilege of having