In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [396]
him and has moreover (this was in keeping with the character and still more with the vocabulary of M. de Charlus) made him feel the difference of their positions, that had made Charlie turn to Saint-Loup in order to aggravate the Baron’s sufferings. He may also have had an eye to his own profit. I had the impression that Robert must be giving him a great deal of money. After an evening party at which I had met Robert before I went down to Combray—and where the manner in which he flaunted himself by the side of a lady of fashion who was reputed to be his mistress, glued to her, never leaving her for a moment, enveloped publicly in the folds of her skirt, reminded me, but with something more hectic and jumpy about it, of a sort of involuntary repetition of an ancestral gesture which I had had an opportunity of observing in M. de Charlus, when he appeared to be wrapped in the finery of Mme Mole or some other lady, the banner of a gynophile cause which was not his own but which, without having any right to do so, he loved to sport thus, whether because he found it useful as a protection or aesthetically charming—I had been struck, as we came away, by the discovery that this young man, so generous when he was far less rich, had become so careful. That a man clings only to what he possesses, and that he who used to scatter money when he so rarely had any now hoards that with which he is amply supplied, is no doubt a common enough phenomenon, and yet in this instance it seemed to me to have assumed a more particular form. Saint-Loup refused to take a cab, and I saw that he had kept a tramway transfer-ticket. No doubt in so doing Saint-Loup was exercising, for different ends, talents which he had acquired in the course of his liaison with Rachel. A young man who has lived for years with a woman is not as inexperienced as the novice for whom the woman he marries is the first. One had only to see, on the rare occasions when Robert took his wife out to a restaurant, the adroit and considerate way he looked after her, his skill and poise in ordering dinner and giving instructions to waiters, the care with which he smoothed Gilberte’s sleeves before she put on her jacket, to realise that he had been a woman’s lover for a long time before being this one’s husband. Similarly, having had to enter into the minutest details of Rachel’s domestic economy, partly because she herself was useless as a housekeeper, and later because his jealousy made him determined to keep a firm control over her domestic staff, he was able, in the administration of his wife’s property and the management of their household, to go on playing this skilful and competent role which Gilberte, perhaps, might have been unable to fulfil and which she gladly relinquished to him. But no doubt he did so principally in order to be able to give Charlie the benefit of his candle-end economies, maintaining him in affluence without Gilberte’s either noticing it or suffering from it—and perhaps even assuming the violinist to be a spendthrift “like all artists” (Charlie styled himself thus without conviction and without conceit, in order to excuse himself for not answering letters and for a mass of other defects which he believed to form part of the undisputed psychology of the artist). Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it. If, therefore, Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me pain. And yet I realised that the pain I felt would have been as acute if Robert had been a bachelor. In anyone else, his conduct would have left me indifferent. But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could