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By Root 1936 0

that had I done so she would still not have come back, that she would be happy to know that Andrée was with me, and was to be my wife, provided that she herself remained free, because she could now, as already for a week past, stultifying the hourly precautions which I had taken during more than six months in Paris, abandon herself to her vices and do what, minute by minute, I had prevented her from doing. I told myself that she was probably making an improper use of her freedom down there, and no doubt this idea which I formed seemed to me sad but remained general, showing me no specific details, and, by the indefinite number of possible mistresses which it allowed me to imagine, prevented me from stopping to consider any one of them, drew my mind on in a sort of perpetual motion not untinged with pain, but with a pain which the absence of any concrete image rendered endurable. It ceased, however, to be endurable and became atrocious when Saint-Loup arrived.

Before I explain why the information that he gave me made me so unhappy, I must relate an incident which occurred immediately before his visit and the memory of which so disturbed me afterwards that it weakened, if not the painful impression made on me by my conversation with Saint-Loup, at any rate the practical effect of that conversation. This incident was as follows. Burning with impatience to see Saint-Loup, I was waiting for him on the staircase (a thing which I could not have done had my mother been at home, for it was what she most abominated, next to “talking out of the window”) when I heard the following words: “What! you mean to say you don’t know how to get a fellow you don’t like sacked? It’s not difficult. For instance, you need only hide the things he has to take in. Then, when they’re in a hurry and ring for him, he can’t find anything, he loses his head. My aunt will be furious with him, and will say to you: ‘But what’s the man doing?’ When he does show his face, everybody will be raging, and he won’t have what’s wanted. After this has happened four or five times you may be sure that he’ll be sacked, especially if you take care to dirty the things that he’s supposed to bring in clean, and a dozen other tricks of that kind.”

I remained speechless with astonishment, for these cruel, Machiavellian words were uttered by the voice of Saint-Loup. Now I had always regarded him as so kind, so tender-hearted a person that these words had the same effect on me as if he had been rehearsing the role of Satan for a play: it could not be in his own name that he was speaking.

“But, after all, a man has to earn his living,” said the other person, of whom I then caught sight and who was one of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s footmen.

“What the hell does that matter to you so long as you’re all right?” Saint-Loup replied callously. “It will be all the more fun for you, having a whipping-boy. You can easily spill ink over his livery just when he has to go and wait at a big dinner-party, and never leave him in peace for a moment until he’s only too glad to give notice. Anyhow, I can put a spoke in his wheel. I shall tell my aunt that I admire your patience in working with a great lout like that, and so dirty too.”

I showed myself, and Saint-Loup came to greet me, but my confidence in him was shaken since I had heard him speak in a manner so different from anything that I knew. And I wondered whether a person who was capable of acting so cruelly towards some poor wretch might not have played the part of a traitor towards me on his mission to Mme Bontemps. This reflexion served mainly, after he had left, to help me not to regard his failure as a proof that I myself might not succeed. But while he was with me, it was still of the Saint-Loup of old, and especially of the friend who had just come from Mme Bontemps, that I thought. He began by saying: “You feel that I ought to have telephoned to you more often, but I was always told that you were engaged.” But the point at which my pain became unendurable was when he said: “To begin where my last telegram left you, after