In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [394]
So far as that day was concerned, I am convinced that, if Aimé was not deliberately lying, he was entirely mistaken. I remembered too well the state Robert was in, the blow he had struck the journalist. And, for that matter, it was the same with the Balbec incident; either the lift-boy had lied, or it was Aimé who was lying. At least so I believed; I could not be absolutely certain, for we never see more than one aspect of things, and had it not been that the thought distressed me, I should have found a certain beauty in the fact that, whereas for me sending the lift-boy to Saint-Loup had been the most convenient way of conveying a letter to him and receiving his answer, for him it had meant making the acquaintance of a person who had taken his fancy. For everything is at least dual. On to the most insignificant action that we perform, another man will graft a series of entirely different actions. Certain it is that Saint-Loup’s adventure with the lift-boy, if it occurred, no more seemed to me to be inherent in the commonplace dispatch of my letter than that a man who knew nothing of Wagner save the duet in Lohengrin would be able to foresee the prelude to Tristan. True, things offer men only a limited number of their innumerable attributes, because of the paucity of our senses. They are coloured because we have eyes; how many other epithets would they not merit if we had hundreds of senses? But this different aspect which they might present is made more comprehensible to us by the occurrence in life of even the most trivial event of which we know a part which we suppose to be the whole, and at which another person looks as through a window opened up on the other side of the house and offering a different view. Supposing that Aimé had not been mistaken, Saint-Loup’s blush when Bloch spoke to him of the lift-boy had not perhaps been due after all to my friend’s pronouncing the word as “lighft.” But I was convinced that Saint-Loup’s physiological evolution had not begun at that period and that he had then been still exclusively a lover of women. More than by any other sign, I could tell this retrospectively by the friendship that Saint-Loup had shown me at Balbec. It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, for some time at least, to the men who did not attract him physically he displayed an indifference which was to some extent, I believe, sincere—for he had become very curt—but which he exaggerated as well in order to make people think that he was interested only in women. But I remember all the same that one day at Doncières, when I was on my way to dine with the Verdurins and he had just been staring rather hard at Morel, he had said to me: “Curious, that fellow reminds me in some ways of Rachel. Doesn’t it strike you? They seem to me identical in some ways. Not that it can be of the slightest interest to me.” And yet his eyes had afterwards remained for a long time gazing abstractedly at the horizon, as when we think, before returning to the card-table or going out to dinner, of one of those long journeys which we think we shall never make, but for which we have felt a momentary longing. But if Robert found something of Rachel in Charlie, Gilberte, for her part, sought to give herself some resemblance to Rachel in order to appear more attractive to her husband, wearing, like her, bows of scarlet or pink or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a similar style, for she believed that her husband was still in love with Rachel, and so was jealous of her. That Robert’s love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible. In any case, the memory of Rachel now played only an aesthetic role in this context. It is indeed improbable that it could have played any other. One day Robert had gone to her to ask her to dress