In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [92]
I fancy nevertheless that, on that precise morning, and probably for the first and only time, Robert detached himself for a moment from the woman whom out of successive layers of tenderness he had gradually created, and suddenly saw at some distance from himself another Rachel, the double of his but entirely different, who was nothing more nor less than a little whore. We had left the blossoming orchard and were making for the train which was to take us back to Paris when, at the station, Rachel, who was walking by herself, was recognised and hailed by a pair of common little “tarts” like herself, who first of all, thinking that she was alone, called out: “Hello, Rachel, why don’t you come with us? Lucienne and Germaine are in the train, and there’s room for one more. Come on, we’ll all go to the rink together.” They were just going to introduce to her two counter-jumpers, their lovers, who were accompanying them, when, noticing that she seemed a little ill at ease, they looked up and beyond her, caught sight of us, and with apologies bade her a good-bye to which she responded in a somewhat embarrassed but none the less friendly tone. They were two poor little tarts with collars of sham otter-skin, looking more or less as Rachel must have looked when Saint-Loup first met her. He did not know them, or their names even, and seeing that they appeared to be on intimate terms with his mistress, he could not help wondering whether she too might not once have had, had not still, perhaps, her place in an unsuspected life, utterly different from the life she led with him, a life in which one had women for a louis apiece. He not only glimpsed this life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel quite different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two little tarts, a twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated herself in his eyes; he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel, if it can be said that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a hundred thousand francs a year, he might easily perhaps have escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But how was it to be done? She had done nothing blameworthy. Less generously rewarded, she would be less nice to him, would stop saying and writing the things that so deeply touched him, things which he would quote, with a touch of boastfulness, to his comrades, taking care to point out how nice it was of her to say them, but omitting to mention that he was maintaining her in the most lavish fashion, or even that he ever gave her anything at all, that these inscriptions on photographs, or tender greetings at the end of telegrams, were but the transmutation of gold in its most exiguous but most precious form. If he took care not to admit that these rare kindnesses on Rachel’s part were handsomely paid for, it would be wrong to say—and yet this oversimplification is applied, absurdly, to every lover who has to pay cash, and to a great many husbands—that this was from self-esteem or vanity. Saint-Loup was intelligent enough to realise that all the pleasures of vanity were freely available to him in society, thanks to his historic name and handsome face, and that his liaison with Rachel had on the contrary tended to cut him off from society, had led to his being less sought after. No; this pride which seeks to appear to be getting for nothing the apparent marks of predilection of the woman one loves is simply a consequence of love, the need to figure in one’s own eyes and in other people’s as being loved by the person whom one loves so much. Rachel rejoined us, leaving the two