In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [57]
“But now we must really join the others, and I’ve mentioned only one of the two things I wanted to ask you, the less important; the other is more important to me, but I’m afraid you’ll never consent. Would it annoy you if we were to call each other tu?”
“Annoy me? My dear fellow! Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!”5
“How can I thank you? . . . After you! It’s such a pleasure to me that you needn’t do anything about Mme de Guermantes if you’d rather not, saying tu and toi is enough.”
“I can do both.”
“I say, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later during dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd, this conversation in fits and starts, I can’t think why—you remember the lady I was speaking to you about just now.”
“Yes.”
“You’re quite sure you know who I mean?”
“Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”
“You wouldn’t care to give me her photograph, I suppose?”
I had meant to ask him only for the loan of it. But as I was about to speak I was overcome with shyness, feeling that the request was indiscreet, and in order to hide my confusion I formulated it more bluntly and amplified it, as if it had been quite natural.
“No, I should have to ask her permission first,” was his answer.
He blushed as he spoke. I could see that he had a reservation in his mind, that he attributed one to me as well, that he would further my love only partially, subject to certain moral principles, and for this I hated him.
At the same time I was touched to see how differently Saint-Loup behaved towards me now that I was no longer alone with him, and that his friends formed an audience. His increased affability would have left me cold had I thought that it was deliberately assumed; but I could feel that it was spontaneous and simply consisted of all that he was wont to say about me in my absence and refrained as a rule from saying when I was alone with him. True, in our private conversations I could detect the pleasure that he found in talking to me, but that pleasure almost always remained unexpressed. Now, at the same remarks of mine which ordinarily he enjoyed without showing it, he watched from the corner of his eye to see whether they produced on his friends the effect on which he had counted and which evidently corresponded to what he had promised them beforehand. The mother of a debutante could be no more anxiously attentive to her daughter’s repartee and to the attitude of the audience. If I had made some remark at which, alone in my company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid that the others might not have seen the point, and kept saying “What? What?” to make me repeat what I had said, to attract their attention, and turning at once to his friends with a hearty laugh, making himself willy-nilly the fugleman of their laughter, presented me for the first time with the opinion that he had of me and must often have expressed to them. So that I caught sight of myself suddenly from the outside, like someone who reads his name in a newspaper or sees himself in a mirror.
It occurred to me on one of these evenings to tell a mildly amusing story about Mme Blandais, but I stopped at once, remembering that Saint-Loup knew it already, and that when I had started to tell it to him the day after my arrival he had interrupted me with: “You told me that before, at Balbec.” I was surprised, therefore, to find him begging me to go on and assuring me that he did not know the story and that it would amuse him immensely. “You’ve forgotten it for the moment,” I said to him, “but you’ll soon remember.” “No, really, I swear to you, you’re mistaken. You’ve never told it to me. Do go on.” And throughout the story he kept his feverish and enraptured gaze fixed alternately on myself and on his friends.