In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [187]
Gilberte had spoken of Robert with a deference which seemed to be addressed more to my sometime friend than to her late husband. It was as though she were saying to me: “I know how much you admired him. Please believe that I too understood what a wonderful person he was.” And yet the love which she assuredly no longer had for his memory was perhaps the remote cause of certain features of her present life. Thus Gilberte now had an inseparable friend in Andrée. And although the latter was beginning, thanks largely to her husband’s talent and her own intelligence, to penetrate, if not into the society of the Guermantes, at least into circles infinitely more fashionable than those in which she had formerly moved, people were astonished that the Marquise de Saint-Loup should condescend to be her closest friend. The friendship was taken to be a sign in Gilberte of her penchant for what she supposed was an artistic existence and for what was, unequivocally, a social decline. This explanation may be the true one. But another occurred to me, convinced as I had always been that the images which we see anywhere assembled are generally the reflexion, or in some indirect fashion an effect, of a first group of different images—quite unlike the second and at a great distance from it, though the two groups are symmetrical. If night after night one saw Andrée and her husband and Gilberte in each other’s company, I wondered whether this was not because, so many years earlier, one might have seen Andrée’s future husband first living with Rachel and then leaving her for Andrée. Very likely Gilberte at the time, in the too remote, too exalted world in which she lived, had known nothing of this. But she must have learned of it later, when Andrée had climbed and she herself had descended enough to be aware of each other’s existence. And when this happened she must have felt very strongly the prestige of the woman for whom Rachel had been abandoned by the man—the no doubt fascinating man—whom she, Rachel, had preferred to Robert. So perhaps the sight of Andrée recalled to Gilberte the youthful romance that her love for Robert had been, and inspired in her a great respect for Andrée, who even now retained the affections of a man so loved by that Rachel whom Gilberte felt to have been more deeply loved by Saint-Loup than she had been herself. But perhaps on the contrary these recollections played no part in Gilberten’s fondness for the artistic couple, and one would have been right to see in her conduct, as many people did, an instance merely of those twin tastes, so often inseparable in society women, for culture and loss of caste. Perhaps Gilberte had forgotten Robert as completely as I had forgotten Albertine, and, even if she knew that Rachel was the woman whom the man of many talents had left for Andrée, never when she saw them thought about this fact which had in no way influenced her liking for them. Whether my alternative explanation was not merely possible but true was a question that could be determined only by appeal to the testimony of the parties themselves, the sole recourse which is open in such a case—or would be if they were able to bring to their confidences both insight and sincerity. But the first of these is rare in the circumstances and the second unknown. Whatever the true explanation of this friendship might be, the sight of Rachel, now a celebrated actress, could not be very agreeable to Gilberte. So I was sorry to hear that she was going to recite some poetry at this party, the programme announced being Musset’s Souvenir and some fables of La Fontaine.
In the background could be heard the Princesse de Guermantes repeating excitedly, in a voice which because of her false teeth was like the rattle of old iron: “Yes, that’s it, we will forgather! We will summon the clan! I love this younger generation, so intelligent, so ready to join in! Ah!” (to a young woman) “what a mujishun you are!” And she fixed her great monocle in her round eye, with an expression half of amusement, half of apology for her inability to sustain gaiety