In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [68]
“You don’t happen to have had any news from Paris?”
“Yes,” he replied gloomily, “bad news.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that it was only he who had cause for unhappiness, and that the news was from his mistress. But I soon saw that one of its consequences would be to prevent Robert for a long time from taking me to see his aunt.
I learned that a quarrel had broken out between him and his mistress, through the post presumably, unless she had come down to pay him a flying visit between trains. And the quarrels, even when relatively slight, which they had previously had, had always seemed as though they must prove insoluble. For she had a violent temper, and would stamp her foot and burst into tears for reasons as incomprehensible as those that make children shut themselves into dark cupboards, not come out for dinner, refuse to give any explanation, and only redouble their sobs when, our patience exhausted, we give them a slap.
To say that Saint-Loup suffered terribly from this estrangement would be an oversimplification, would give a false impression of his grief. When he found himself alone, with nothing else to think about but his mistress parting from him with the respect for him which she had felt on seeing him so full of energy and vigour, the agony he had experienced during the first few hours at first gave way before the irreparable, and the cessation of pain is such a relief that the rupture, once it was certain, assumed for him something of the same kind of charm as a reconciliation. What he began to suffer from a little later was a secondary and accidental grief, the tide of which flowed incessantly from within himself, at the idea that perhaps she would have been glad to make it up, that it was not inconceivable that she was waiting for a word from him, that in the meantime, by way of revenge, she would perhaps on a certain evening, in a certain place, do a certain thing, and that he had only to telegraph to her that he was coming for it not to happen, that others perhaps were taking advantage of the time which he was letting slip, and that in a few days it would be too late to get her back, for she would be already bespoken. Among all these possibilities he was certain of nothing; his mistress preserved a silence which wrought him up to such a frenzy of grief that he began to ask himself whether she might not be in hiding at Doncières, or have set sail for the Indies.
It has been said that silence is strength; in a quite different sense it is a terrible strength in the hands of those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert said to himself: “What can she be doing, to keep so silent as this? Obviously she’s being unfaithful to me with others.” He also said to himself: “What have I done that she should be so silent? Perhaps she hates me, and will go on hating me for ever.” And he reproached himself. Thus silence indeed drove him mad with jealousy and remorse. Besides, more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. It is an intangible enclosure, true, but an impenetrable one, this interposed slice of empty atmosphere through which nevertheless the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible form of illumination than that of silence, which shows us not one absent love but a thousand, and shows us each of them in the act of indulging in some new betrayal? Sometimes, in a sudden slackening of tension, Robert would imagine that this silence was about to cease, that the letter was on its way. He saw it, it had arrived, he started