In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [189]
I spoke to the latter of the new writer. He put me off him not so much by assuring me that his art was uncouth, facile and vacuous, as by telling me that he had seen him and had almost mistaken him (so strong was the likeness) for Bloch. The latter’s image thenceforth loomed over the printed pages, and I no longer felt under compulsion to make the effort necessary to understand them. If Bergotte had decried him to me it was less, I fancy, from jealousy of a success that was yet to come than from ignorance of his work. He read scarcely anything. The bulk of his thought had long since passed from his brain into his books. He had grown thin, as though they had been extracted from him by a surgical operation. His reproductive instinct no longer impelled him to any activity, now that he had given an independent existence to almost all his thoughts. He led the vegetative life of a convalescent, of a woman after childbirth; his fine eyes remained motionless, vaguely dazed, like the eyes of a man lying on the sea-shore and in a vague day-dream contemplating only each little breaking wave. However, if it was less interesting to talk to him now than I should once have found it, I felt no compunction about that. He was so far a creature of habit that the simplest as well as the most luxurious habits, once he had formed them, became indispensable to him for a certain length of time. I do not know what made him come to our house the first time, but thereafter he came every day simply because he had been there the day before. He would turn up at the house as he might have gone to a café, in order that no one should talk to him, in order that he might—very rarely—talk himself, so that it would have been difficult on the whole to say whether he was moved by our grief or that he enjoyed my company, had one sought to draw any conclusion from such assiduity. But it did not fail to impress my mother, sensitive to everything that might be regarded as an act of homage to her invalid. And every day she reminded me: “See that you don’t forget to thank him nicely.”
We had also—a discreet feminine attention like the refreshments that are brought to one, between sittings, by a painter’s mistress—as a supplement, free of charge, to those which her husband paid us professionally, a visit from Mme Cottard. She came to offer us her “waiting-woman,” or, if we preferred the services of a man, she would “scour the country” for one, and on our declining, said that she did hope this was not just a “put-off” on our part, a word which in her world signified a false pretext for not accepting an invitation. She assured us that the Professor, who never referred to his patients when he was at home, was as sad about it as if it had been she herself who was ill. We shall see in due course that even if this had been true it would have meant at once very little and a great deal on the part of the most unfaithful and the most attentive of husbands.
Offers as helpful, and infinitely more touching in the way in which they were expressed (which was a blend of the highest intelligence, the warmest sympathy, and a rare felicity of expression), were addressed to me by the heir to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. I had met him at Balbec where he had come on a visit to one of his aunts, the Princesse de Luxembourg, being himself at that time