My Year With Proust - Day 213

"I do not know whether he formulated to himself the notion that she was of a superior essence to the rest of the world, but he was exclusively preoccupied and concerned with what affected her.  Through her and for her he was capable of suffering, of being happy, perhaps of killing.  There was really nothing that interested, that could excite him except what his mistress wanted, what she was going to do, what was going on, discernible at most in fleeting changes of expression, in the narrow expanse of her face and behind her privileged brow.  So nice-minded in all else, he looked forward to the prospect of a brilliant, marriage, solely in order to be able to continue to maintain and keep her.  If one had asked oneself what was the value that he set on her, I doubt whether one could ever have imagined a figure high enough.  If he did not marry her, it was because a practical instinct warned him that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would leave him, or would at least live as she pleased, and that he must retain his hold on her by keeping her in expectation.  For he admitted the possibility that she did not love him.  No doubt the general malady called love must have forced him - as it forces all men - to believe at times that she did.  But in his heart of hearts he felt that her love for him was not inconsistent with her remaining with him only on account of his money, and that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would make haste (the dupe of her literary friends and their theories, and yet still loving him, he thought) to leave him."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 158-159

And another man is loving poorly in Remembrance of Things Past, in this case Robert and his mistress (which we'll learn about tomorrow).  In this passage Proust refers to the "general malady" of love, and as we saw with Charles Swann and Proust himself, it seems that no man gets out unbruised.  Robert felt that "he must retain his hold on her by keeping her in expectation," because he believed that once she had what she wanted from him she would surely leave.  Is this truly at the heart of the "general malady" of love: the belief that the person we love so dearly and fiercely and madly doesn't really love us at all?  We romantically envision a world wherein this person will provide us everything that we would ever want; a person who we can spend of our lives with and tell everything; a person who, if nothing else, we allow to sleep next to us in a house full of sharp knives - and yet we, in a breathtaking intellectual and emotional balancing act, decide that we can only keep them by tricking them into loving us (or at least being dependent upon us).