trained to perform a certain number of well-bred dissimulations, and that, like a consummate actor, he could, in his regimental and in his social life, play alternately quite different parts. In one of his parts he loved me tenderly, he acted towards me almost as if he had been my brother; my brother he had been, he was now again, but for a moment that day he had been another person who did not know me and who, holding the reins, his glass screwed to his eye, without a look or a smile had lifted his disengaged hand to the peak of his cap to give me correctly the military salute.
The stage scenery, still in its place, among which I was passing, seen thus at close range and without the advantage of any of those effects of lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had painted it had calculated, was a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive force. The curves of her charming nose had stood out in perspective, between stalls and stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer herself, I recognised her only thanks to her eyes, in which her identity had taken refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a moment ago, had vanished. On the other hand — as though we came close to the moon and it ceased to present the appearance of a disk of rosy gold — on this face, so smooth a surface until now, I could distinguish only protuberances, discolourations, cavities. Despite the incoherence into which were resolved at close range not only the feminine features but the painted canvas, I was glad to be there to wander among the scenery, all that setting which at one time my love of nature had prompted me to dismiss as tedious and artificial until the description of it by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister had given it a sort of beauty in my eyes; and I had already observed with delight, in the thick of a crowd of journalists or men of friends of the actresses, who were greeting one another, talking, smoking, as though in a public thoroughfare, a young man in a black velvet cap and hortensia-coloured skirt, his cheeks chalked in red like a page from a Watteau album, who with his smiling lips, his eyes raised to the ceiling, as he sprang lightly into the air, seemed so entirely of another species than the rational folk in everyday clothes, in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the course of his ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their life, so anterior to the habits of their civilisation, so enfranchised from all the laws of nature, that it was as restful and as fresh a spectacle as watching a butterfly straying along a crowded street to follow with one’s eyes, between the strips of canvas, the natural arabesques traced by his winged capricious painted oscillations. But at that moment Saint-Loup conceived the idea that his mistress was paying undue attention to this dancer, who was engaged now in practising for the last time the figure of fun with which he was going to take the stage, and his face darkened.
“You might look the other way,” he warned her gloomily. “You know that none of those dancer-fellows is worth the rope they can at least fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”
A group of men — journalists — noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what we were saying. And as the stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were forced into close contact with them.
“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how well made he is, do watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves like his whole body!”
The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelids stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth into cheeks plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the girl, like a singer who hums to oblige us the air of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the fineness of a parodist and the good humour of a child.
“Oh, that’s too lovely, the way he copies himself,” she cried, clapping her hands.
“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of utter misery, “do not make a scene here, I can’t stand it; I swear, if you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk straight out; come, don’t be so naughty…. You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he went on, to me, with the solicitude he had shewn for me in our Balbec days.
“Oh! What a good thing it would be if you did go.”
“I warn you, if I do I shan’t come back.”
“That’s more than I should venture to hope.”
“Listen; you know, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to me, but the moment you treat me like this….”
“Ah! Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me your promise; I ought to have known you’d never keep it. You want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not a money-grubber like you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know some one else who’ll give it to me.”
“No one else can possibly give it to you; I’ve told Boucheron he’s to keep it for me, and I have his promise not to let anyone else have it.”
“There you are, trying to blackmail me, you’ve arranged everything, I see. That’s what they mean by Marsantes, Mater Semita, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel quoting an etymology which was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for Semita means ‘path’ and not ‘Semite,’ but one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the Dreyfusard views for which, so far as that went, he was indebted to the actress. She was less entitled than anyone to apply the word ‘Jew’ to Mme. de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in finding no trace of Judaism apart from her connexion with the Lévy-Mirepoix family. “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You have acted treacherously towards me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long; don’t you worry.”
Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may have been once in the wrong. And I could not help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent expression which he had used at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”
“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal promise: once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you; I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or what my ulterior motive is supposed to be. You can’t seriously maintain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you take it in that way, my dear. What possible interest can I have in hurting you? You know very well that my one interest in life is yourself.”
“Oh, yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor. And turning to watch the dancer:
“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands. A woman like me couldn’t do the things he’s doing now.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s furious face: “Look, he’s hurt,” she murmured, in the momentary elation of a sadic impulse to cruelty totally out of keeping with the genuine feelings of affection for Saint-Loup.
“Listen, for the last time, I swear to you it doesn’t matter what you do — in a week you’ll be giving anything to get me back — I shan’t come; it’s a clean cut, do you hear, it’s irrevocable; you will be sorry one day, when it’s too late.”
Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving his mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of remaining with her in certain circumstances.
“But, my dear boy,” he went on, to me, “you oughtn’t to stand about here, I tell you, it will make you cough.”
I pointed to the scenery which barred my way. He touched his hat and said to one of the journalists:
“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar; the smoke is bad for my friend.”
His mistress had not waited for him to accompany her; on her way to her dressing-room she turned round and:
“Do they do