In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [393]
If Jupien traced back to a quite recent origin the new orientation, so divergent from their original course, that Robert’s carnal pleasures had assumed, a conversation which I had with Aimé and which made me extremely unhappy showed me that the head waiter at Balbec traced this divergence, this inversion, back to a far earlier date. The occasion of this conversation had been a brief visit I paid to Balbec, where Saint-Loup himself, on long leave, had also come with his wife, whom during this first phase he never allowed out of his sight. I had been struck by the extent to which Rachel’s influence over Robert still made itself felt. Only a young husband who has long been keeping a mistress knows how to take off his wife’s cloak as they enter a restaurant, how to treat her with due attentiveness. He has received, during the course of his liaison, the education which a good husband requires. Not far from him, at a table adjoining mine, Bloch, among a party of pretentious young academics, was assuming a spuriously relaxed air, and shouted at the top of his voice to one of his friends, as he ostentatiously passed him the menu with a gesture which upset two carafes of water: “No, no, my dear fellow, you order! Never in my life have I been able to make head or tail of these documents. I’ve never known how to order dinner!” he repeated with a pride that was obviously insincere and, blending literature with greed, decided at once upon a bottle of champagne which he liked to see “in a purely symbolic fashion” adorning a conversation. Saint-Loup, on the other hand, did know how to order. He was seated by the side of Gilberte—already pregnant (subsequently he did not fail to keep her continually supplied with offspring)37—as he slept by her side in their double bed in the hotel. He spoke to no one but his wife; the rest of the hotel appeared not to exist for him; but whenever a waiter came to take an order, and stood close beside him, he swiftly raised his blue eyes and darted a glance at him which did not last for more than two seconds, but in its limpid penetration seemed to indicate a kind of investigative curiosity entirely different from that which might have inspired any ordinary diner scrutinising, even at greater length, a page or waiter with a view to making humorous or other observations about him which he would communicate to his friends. This little glance, brief, disinterested, showing that the waiter interested him in himself, would have revealed to anyone who intercepted it that this excellent husband, this once so passionate lover of Rachel, had another plane in his life, and one that seemed to him infinitely more interesting than the one on which he moved from a sense of duty. But it was not otherwise visible. Already his eyes had returned to Gilberte who had noticed nothing; he introduced her to a passing friend and left the room to stroll with her outside. It was then that Aimé spoke to me of a far earlier time, the time when I had made Saint-Loup’s acquaintance through Mme de Villeparisis, in this same Balbec.
“Why, of course, Monsieur,” he said to me, “it’s common knowledge, I’ve known it for ever so long. The first year Monsieur came to Balbec, M. le Marquis shut himself up with my lift-boy, on the pretext of developing some photographs of Monsieur’s grandmother. The boy made a complaint, and we had the greatest difficulty in hushing the matter up. And besides, Monsieur, Monsieur remembers the day, no doubt, when he came to lunch at the restaurant with M. le Marquis de Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom M. le Marquis was using as a screen. Monsieur doubtless remembers that M. le Marquis left the room, pretending that he had lost his temper. Of course I don’t suggest for a moment that Madame was in the right. She was leading him a regular dance.