In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [208]
quite how the liaison had begun, he had fallen in love with Mme de Forcheville. When one considered what her age must now be, this seemed extraordinary. But perhaps she had been very young when she started on her amatory career. And then there are women who, decade after decade, are found in a new incarnation, having new love affairs (sometimes long after one had thought they were dead) and causing the despair of young wives who are abandoned for them by their husbands. In any case, the Duke’s liaison with Mme de Forcheville had assumed such proportions that the old man, imitating in this final love the pattern of those that he had had in the past, watched jealously over his mistress in a manner which, if my love for Albertine had, with important variations, repeated the love of Swann for Odette, made that of M. de Guermantes for this same Odette recall my own for Albertine. He insisted that she should lunch with him and dine with him and he was always in her house, so that she was able to show him off to friends who without her would never have made the acquaintance of a Duc de Guermantes and who came there to meet him rather as one might go to the house of a courtesan to meet a king, her lover. It was true that Mme de Forcheville had long ago become a society lady. But starting again late in life to be kept, and to be kept by an old man of such enormous pride who, in spite of the situation, was the important person in her house, she was herself not too proud to wear only those wraps which pleased him, to serve only the dishes that he liked, and to flatter her friends by telling them that she had spoken of them to her new lover just as in the old days she would tell my great-uncle that she had spoken of him to the Grand Duke who sent her cigarettes; in a word, in spite of all that she had accomplished in building up a social position, she was tending under pressure of new circumstances to become once more, as she had first appeared to me in my earliest childhood, the lady in pink. (It was, of course, many years since my uncle Adolphe had died, but the replacement of the old figures around us by new ones does not necessarily prevent us from beginning our old life again.) If Odette had yielded to the pressure of her new circumstances, this was no doubt partly from greed, but also because, having been much sought after in society as the mother of an eligible daughter and then ignored once Gilberte had married Saint-Loup, she foresaw that the Duc de Guermantes, who would have done anything for her, would rally to her side a number of duchesses who would perhaps be delighted to do an ill turn to their friend Oriane; and perhaps too she warmed to the game when she saw how it distressed the Duchess, in whose discomfiture a feminine sentiment of rivalry caused her to rejoice. Even among the Duke’s relations she now had her partisans. Saint-Loup up to his death had continued loyally to visit her with his wife. Were not he and Gilberte heirs both to M. de Guermantes and to Odette, who would herself no doubt be the principal beneficiary of the Duke’s will? And even Courvoisier nephews with the most exacting standards, even the Princesse de Trania and Mme de Marsantes, came to her house in the hope of a legacy, without worrying about the pain that this might cause the Duchess, of whom Odette, stung by past affronts, spoke in the most scurrilous fashion. As for the Duke’s own social position, his liaison with Mme de Forcheville—this liaison which was merely a pale copy of earlier affairs of the same kind—had recently caused him for the second time in his life to lose his chance of the presidency of the Jockey and a vacant seat in the Académie des Beaux-Arts, just as the way of life of M. de Charlus and his public association with Jupien had cost him the presidency of the Union and that also of the Société des Amis du Vieux Paris when these were within his grasp. Thus the two brothers, so different in their tastes, had lost their reputations from a common indolence and a common lack of will, qualities already perceptible, but in a more