In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [190]
As I answered the questions with which his wife kept plying me about Morel, my thoughts returned to a conversation I had had with my mother that afternoon. Without attempting to dissuade me from going to the Verdurins’ if there was a chance of my enjoying myself there, she had pointed out that it was a circle of which my grandfather would not have approved, which would have made him exclaim: “On guard!” Then she had gone on to say: “By the way, Judge Toureuil and his wife told me they had been to lunch with Mme Bontemps. They asked me no questions. But I seemed to gather from what was said that a marriage between you and Albertine would be the joy of her aunt’s life. I think the real reason is that they are all extremely fond of you. At the same time the style in which they imagine that you would be able to keep her, the sort of connexions they more or less know that we have—all that is not, I fancy, entirely irrelevant, although it may be a minor consideration. I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you myself, because I’m not keen on it, but as I imagine they’ll mention it to you, I thought I’d get a word in first.” “But you yourself, what do you think of her?” I asked my mother. “Well, I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage. But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you. As a matter of fact, I can’t say what I think of Albertine; I don’t think of her. All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sévigné: ‘She has good qualities, or so I believe. But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives. She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent. In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.’ And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy.” But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phèdre and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Perhaps the best thing would be to wait a little longer, to begin by seeing Albertine as I had seen her in the past, so as to find out whether I really loved her. I might take her, as a diversion, to see the Verdurins, and this thought reminded me that I had come there myself that evening only to learn whether Mme Putbus was staying there or was expected. In any case, she was not dining with them.
“Speaking of your friend Saint-Loup,” said Mme de Cambremer, using an expression which betrayed more consistency in her train of thought than her remarks might have led one to suppose, for if she spoke to me about music she was thinking about the Guermantes, “you know that everybody is talking about his marriage to the niece of the Princesse de Guermantes. Though I may say that, for my part, all that society gossip concerns me not one whit.” I was seized by a fear that I might have spoken unfeelingly to Robert about the girl in question, a girl full of sham originality, whose mind was as mediocre as her temper was violent. Hardly ever do we hear anything that does not make us regret something we have said. I replied to Mme de Cambremer, truthfully as it happened, that I knew nothing about it, and that anyhow I thought that the girl seemed rather young to be engaged.
“That is perhaps why it’s not yet official. Anyhow there