The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (170 page)

It was not “Rachel when from the Lord,” who seemed to me of little significance, it was the power of the human imagination, the illusion on which were based the pains of love, that I found so striking. Robert noticed that I seemed moved. I turned my eyes to the pear and cherry trees of the garden opposite, so that he might think that it was their beauty that had touched me. And it did touch me in somewhat the same way; it also brought close to me things of the kind which we not only see with our eyes but feel also in our hearts. In likening those trees that I had seen in the garden to strange deities, had I not been mistaken like Magdalene when, in another garden, on a day whose anniversary was soon to come, she saw a human form, “supposing him to be the gardener”? Treasurers of our memories of the golden age, keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose, that the splendour of poetry, the wonderful radiance of innocence may shine in it and may be the recompense which we strive to earn, were they not, these great white creatures miraculously bowed over that shade so propitious for rest, for angling or for reading, were they not rather angels? I exchanged a few words with Saint-Loup’s mistress. We cut across the village. Its houses were sordid. But by each of the most wretched, of those that looked as though they had been scorched and branded by a rain of brimstone, a mysterious traveller, halting for a day in the accursed city, a resplendent angel, stood erect, stretching over it the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in flower: it was a pear-tree. Saint-Loup drew me a little way ahead to explain:

“I should have liked you and me to have been able to stay together, in fact I’d much rather have had lunch just with you, and stayed with you until it was time to go to my aunt’s. But this poor girl of mine here, it gives her so much pleasure, and she’s so nice to me, don’t you know, I hadn’t the heart to refuse her. In any case you’ll like her, she’s literary, so responsive, and besides it’s such a pleasure to be with her in a restaurant, she’s so charming, so simple, always delighted with everything.”

I fancy nevertheless that, on that precise morning, and probably for the first and only time, Robert detached himself for a moment from the woman whom out of successive layers of tenderness he had gradually created, and suddenly saw at some distance from himself another Rachel, the double of his but entirely different, who was nothing more nor less than a little whore. We had left the blossoming orchard and were making for the train which was to take us back to Paris when, at the station, Rachel, who was walking by herself, was recognised and hailed by a pair of common little “tarts” like herself, who first of all, thinking that she was alone, called out: “Hello, Rachel, why don’t you come with us? Lucienne and Germaine are in the train, and there’s room for one more. Come on, we’ll all go to the rink together.” They were just going to introduce to her two counter-jumpers, their lovers, who were accompanying them, when, noticing that she seemed a little ill at ease, they looked up and beyond her, caught sight of us, and with apologies bade her a good-bye to which she responded in a somewhat embarrassed but none the less friendly tone. They were two poor little tarts with collars of sham otter-skin, looking more or less as Rachel must have looked when Saint-Loup first met her. He did not know them, or their names even, and seeing that they appeared to be on intimate terms with his mistress, he could not help wondering whether she too might not once have had, had not still, perhaps, her place in an unsuspected life, utterly different from the life she led with him, a life in which one had women for a louis apiece. He not only glimpsed this life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel quite different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two little tarts, a twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated herself in his eyes; he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel, if it can be said that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a hundred thousand francs a year, he might easily perhaps have escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But how was it to be done? She had done nothing blameworthy. Less generously rewarded, she would be less nice to him, would stop saying and writing the things that so deeply touched him, things which he would quote, with a touch of boastfulness, to his comrades, taking care to point out how nice it was of her to say them, but omitting to mention that he was maintaining her in the most lavish fashion, or even that he ever gave her anything at all, that these inscriptions on photographs, or tender greetings at the end of telegrams, were but the transmutation of gold in its most exiguous but most precious form. If he took care not to admit that these rare kindnesses on Rachel’s part were handsomely paid for, it would be wrong to say—and yet this oversimplification is applied, absurdly, to every lover who has to pay cash, and to a great many husbands—that this was from self-esteem or vanity. Saint-Loup was intelligent enough to realise that all the pleasures of vanity were freely available to him in society, thanks to his historic name and handsome face, and that his liaison with Rachel had on the contrary tended to cut him off from society, had led to his being less sought after. No; this pride which seeks to appear to be getting for nothing the apparent marks of predilection of the woman one loves is simply a consequence of love, the need to figure in one’s own eyes and in other people’s as being loved by the person whom one loves so much. Rachel rejoined us, leaving the two tarts to get into their compartment; but, no less than their sham otter-skins and the self-conscious appearance of their young men, the names Lucienne and Germaine kept the new Rachel alive for a moment longer. For a moment Robert imagined a Place Pigalle existence with unknown associates, sordid pick-ups, afternoons spent in simple pleasures, in that Paris in which the sunny brightness of the streets from the Boulevard de Clichy onwards did not seem the same as the solar radiance in which he himself strolled with his mistress, for love, and suffering that is inseparable from it, have, like intoxication, the power to differentiate things for us. It was almost another Paris in the heart of Paris itself that he suspected; his liaison appeared to him like the exploration of a strange life, for if when with him Rachel was somewhat similar to himself, it was nevertheless a part of her real life that she lived with him, indeed the most precious part in view of his reckless expenditure on her, the part that made her so greatly envied by her friends and would enable her one day to retire to the country or to establish herself in the leading theatres, when she had made her pile. Robert longed to ask her who Lucienne and Germaine were, what they would have said to her if she had joined them in their compartment, how they would all have spent a day which would perhaps have ended, as a supreme diversion, after the pleasures of the skating-rink, at the Olympia Tavern, if Robert and I had not been there. For a moment the purlieus of the Olympia, which until then had seemed to him deadly dull, stirred his curiosity and anguish, and the sunshine of this spring day beating down on the Rue Caumartin where, possibly, if she had not known Robert, Rachel might have gone that afternoon and have earned a louis, filled him with a vague longing. But what would be the use of plying Rachel with questions when he already knew that her answer would be merely silence, or a lie, or something extremely painful for him to hear, which would yet explain nothing. The porters were shutting the doors; we hurriedly climbed into a first-class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price; he caressed her, restored her to her place in his heart where he could contemplate her, interiorised, as he had always done hitherto—save during this brief instant in which he had seen her in the Place Pigalle of an Impressionist painter—and the train moved off.

It was true that she was “literary.” She never stopped talking to me about books, Art Nouveau and Tolstoyism, except to rebuke Saint-Loup for drinking too much wine:

“Ah! if you could live with me for a year, we’d see a fine change. I should keep you on water and you’d be much better for it.”

“Right you are. Let’s go away.”

“But you know quite well I have a great deal of work to do” (for she took her dramatic art very seriously). “Besides, what would your family say?”

And she began to abuse his family to me in terms which seemed to me highly justified, and with which Saint-Loup, while disobeying Rachel in the matter of champagne, entirely concurred. I, who was so afraid of the effect of wine on him, and felt the good influence of his mistress, was quite prepared to advise him to let his family go hang. Tears sprang to the young woman’s eyes when I was rash enough to mention Dreyfus.

“The poor martyr!” she almost sobbed; “it will be the death of him in that dreadful place.”

“Don’t upset yourself, Zézette, he’ll come back, he’ll be acquitted all right, they’ll admit they made a mistake.”

“But long before then he’ll be dead! Ah well, at least his children will bear a stainless name. But just think of the agony he must be going through: that’s what I can’t stand! And would you believe that Robert’s mother, a pious woman, says that he ought to be left on Devil’s Island even if he’s innocent. Isn’t that appalling?”

“Yes, it’s absolutely true, she does say that,” Robert assured me. “She’s my mother, I can’t contradict her, but it’s quite clear she hasn’t got a sensitive nature like Zézette.”

In reality these luncheons which were said to be “such a pleasure” always led to trouble. For as soon as Saint-Loup found himself in a public place with his mistress, he would imagine that she was looking at every other man in the room, and his brow would darken; she would notice his ill-humour, which she perhaps took pleasure in fanning, but which more probably, out of stupid pride, feeling wounded by his tone, she did not wish to appear to be seeking to disarm; she would pretend not to be able to take her eyes off some man or other, and indeed this was not always purely for fun. In fact the man who happened to be sitting next to them in a theatre or a café, or, to go no further, the driver of the cab they had engaged, need only have something attractive about him, and Robert, his perception quickened by jealousy, would have noticed it before his mistress; he would see in him immediately one of those foul creatures whom he had denounced to me at Balbec, who corrupted and dishonoured women for their own amusement, and would beg his mistress to avert her eyes from the man, thereby drawing her attention to him. And sometimes she found that Robert had shown such good taste in his suspicions that after a while she even left off teasing him in order that he might calm down and consent to go off by himself on some errand which would give her time to enter into conversation with the stranger, often to make an assignation, sometimes even to bring matters to a head there and then.

I could see as soon as we entered the restaurant that Robert was looking troubled. For he had at once observed—what had escaped our notice at Balbec—that among his coarser colleagues Aimé exuded not only a modest distinction but, quite unconsciously of course, that air of romance which emanates for a certain number of years from fine hair and a Grecian nose, features thanks to which he stood out among the crowd of other waiters. These, almost all of them well on in years, presented a series of types, extraordinarily ugly and pronounced, of hypocritical priests, sanctimonious confessors, more numerously of actors of the old school whose sugarloaf foreheads are scarcely to be seen nowadays outside the collections of portraits that hang in the humbly historic green-rooms of antiquated little theatres, where they are represented in the roles of servants or pontiffs, though this restaurant seemed, thanks to selective recruiting and perhaps to some system of hereditary nomination, to have preserved their solemn type in a sort of College of Augurs. As ill luck would have it, Aimé having recognised us, it was he who came to take our order, while the procession of operatic high-priests swept past us to other tables. Aimé inquired after my grandmother’s health; I asked for news of his wife and children. He gave it to me with feeling, for he was a family man. He had an intelligent and vigorous but respectful air. Robert’s mistress began to gaze at him with a strange attentiveness. But Aimé’s sunken eyes, to which a slight short-sightedness gave a sort of veiled depth, betrayed no sign of awareness in his still face. In the provincial hotel in which he had served for many years before coming to Balbec, the charming sketch, now a trifle discoloured and faded, which was his face, and which, for all those years, like some engraved portrait of Prince Eugène, had been visible always in the same place, at the far end of a dining-room that was almost always empty, had probably not attracted many curious looks. He had thus for long remained, doubtless for want of connoisseurs, in ignorance of the artistic value of his face, and moreover but little inclined to draw attention to it, for he was temperamentally cold. At most some passing Parisian lady, stopping for some reason in the town, had raised her eyes to his, had asked him perhaps to serve her in her room before she took the train again, and, in the pellucid, monotonous, profound void of the existence of this good husband and provincial hotel servant, had buried the secret of a short-lived whim which no one would ever bring to light. And yet Aimé must have been conscious of the insistence with which the eyes of the young actress were fastened upon him now. At all events it did not escape Robert, beneath whose skin I saw a flush begin to gather, not vivid like that which burned his cheeks when he felt sudden emotion, but faint and diffused.

“Anything specially interesting about that waiter, Zézette?” he inquired, after sharply dismissing Aimé. “One would think you were making a study of him.”

“There we go again; I knew it would happen!”