“I hear,” he went on, “that you took part this morning in one of those orgies that he has with a woman who is disgracing him. You would do well to use your influence with him to make him realise the pain he is causing his poor mother, and all of us, by dragging our name in the dirt.”
I should have liked to reply that at this degrading luncheon the conversation had been entirely about Emerson, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and that the young woman had lectured Robert to make him drink nothing but water. In the hope of bringing some balm to Robert, whose pride had, I felt, been wounded, I sought to find an excuse for his mistress. I did not know that at that moment, in spite of his anger with her, it was on himself that he was heaping reproaches. But it always happens, even in quarrels between a good man and a worthless woman, and when the right is all on one side, that some trifle crops up which enables the woman to appear not to have been in the wrong on one point. And as she ignores all the other points, the moment the man begins to feel the need of her company, or is demoralised by separation from her, his weakness will make his conscience more exacting, he will remember the absurd reproaches that have been 383flung at him and will ask himself whether they have not some foundation in fact.
“I’ve come to the conclusion I was wrong about that matter of the necklace,” Robert said to me. “Of course, I never meant for a moment to do anything wrong, but, I know very well, other people don’t look at things in the same way as oneself. She had a very hard time when she was young. In her eyes, I was bound to appear just the rich man who thinks he can get anything he wants with his money, and with whom a poor person cannot compete, whether in trying to influence Boucheron or in a lawsuit. Of course she has been horribly cruel to me, when I have never thought of anything but her good. But I do see clearly, she believes that I wanted to make her feel that one could keep a hold on her with money, and that’s not true. And she’s so fond of me; what must she be thinking of me? Poor darling, if you only knew, she has such charming ways, I simply can’t tell you, she has often done the most adorable things for me. How wretched she must be feeling now! In any case, whatever happens in the long run, I don’t want to let her think me a cad; I shall dash off to Boucheron’s and get the necklace. You never know; very likely when she sees me with it, she will admit that she’s been in the wrong. Don’t you see, it’s the idea that she is suffering at this moment that I can’t bear. What one suffers oneself one knows; that’s nothing. But with her—to say to oneself that she’s suffering and not to be able to form any idea of what she feels—I think I shall go mad in a minute—I’ld much rather never see her again than let her suffer. She can be happy without me, if she must; that’s all I ask. Listen; you know, to me everything that 384concerns her is enormously important, it becomes something cosmic; I shall run to the jeweller’s and then go and ask her to forgive me. But until I get down there what will she be thinking of me? If she could only know that I was on my way! What about your going down there and telling her? For all we know, that might settle the whole business. Perhaps,” he went on with a smile, as though he hardly ventured to believe in so idyllic a possibility, “we can all three dine together in the country. But we can’t tell yet. I never know how to handle her. Poor child, I shall perhaps only hurt her more than ever. Besides, her decision may be irrevocable.”
Robert swept me back to his mother.
“Good-bye,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go now. I don’t know when I shall get leave again. Probably not for a month. I shall write as soon as I know myself.”
Certainly Robert was not in the least of the type of son who, when he goes out with his mother, feels that an attitude of exasperation towards her ought to balance the smiles and bows which he bestows on strangers. Nothing is more common than this odious form of vengeance on the part of those who appear to believe that rudeness to one’s own family is the natural complement to one’s ceremonial behaviour. Whatever the wretched mother may say, her son, as though he had been taken to the house against his will and wished to make her pay dearly for his presence, refutes immediately, with an ironical, precise, cruel contradiction, the timidly ventured assertion; the mother at once conforms, though without thereby disarming him, to the opinion of this superior being of whom she will continue to boast to everyone, when he is not present, as having a charming 385nature, and who all the same spares her none of his keenest thrusts. Saint-Loup was not at all like this; but the anguish which Rachel’s absence provoked in him brought it about that, for different reasons, he was no less harsh with his mother than the sons I have been describing are with theirs. And as she listened to him I saw the same throb, like that of a mighty wing, which Mme. de Marsantes had been unable to repress when her son first entered the room, convulse her whole body once again; but this time it was an anxious face, eyes wide with grief that she fastened on him.
“What, Robert, you’re going away? Seriously? My little son! The one day I’ve seen anything of you!”
And then quite softly, in the most natural tone, in a voice from which she strove to banish all sadness so as not to inspire her son with a pity which would perhaps have been painful to him, or else useless and might serve only to irritate him, like an argument prompted by plain common sense she added:
“You know, it’s not at all nice of you.”
But to this simplicity she added so much timidity, to shew him that she was not trespassing on his freedom, so much affection, so that he should not reproach her with spoiling his pleasures, that Saint-Loup could not fail to observe in himself as it were the possibility of a similar wave of affection, that was to say an obstacle to his spending the evening with his lady. And so he grew angry:
“It’s unfortunate, but, nice or not, that’s how it is.”
And he heaped on his mother the reproaches which no doubt he felt that he himself perhaps deserved; thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having laid down 386at the start that their determination is unshakeable, the more the sentiment in them to which one appeals to make them abandon it is touched, the more fault they find, not with themselves who resist the appeal but with those persons who put them under the necessity of resisting it, with the result that their own firmness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty, which only aggravates all the more in their eyes the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity. But of her own accord Mme. de Marsantes ceased to insist, for she felt that she would not be able to keep him.
“I shall leave you here,” he said to me, “but you’re not to keep him long, Mamma, because he’s got to go somewhere else in a minute.”
I was fully aware that my company could not afford any pleasure to Mme. de Marsantes, but I preferred, by not going with Robert, not to let her suppose that I was involved in these pleasures which deprived her of him. I should have liked to find some excuse for her son’s conduct, less from affection for him than from pity for her. But it was she who spoke first:
“Poor boy,” she began, “I am sure I must have hurt him dreadfully. You see, Sir, mothers are such selfish creatures, after all he hasn’t many pleasures, he comes so little to Paris. Oh, dear, if he hadn’t gone already I should have liked to stop him, not to keep him of course, but just to tell him that I’m not vexed with him, that I think he was quite right. Will you excuse me if I go and look over the staircase?”
I accompanied her there.
387“Robert! Robert!” she called. “No; he’s gone; we are too late.”
At that moment I would as gladly have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as, a few hours earlier, to make him
