My Year With Proust - Day 214

   "Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in this woman who was for him the epitome of love, of all the sweet things of life, whose personality, mysterious enshrined as in a tabernacle, was the object that occupied incessantly his toiled imagination, whom he felt that he would never know, as to whom he asked himself what could be her secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh - in this woman I recognised instantaneously 'Rachel when from the Lord,' she who, but a few years since (women change their situation so rapidly in that world, when they do change) used to say to the procuress: 'To-morrow evening, then, if you want me for someone, you'll send round for me, won't you?'

   And when they had 'come around' for her, and she found herself alone in the room with the 'someone,' she knew so well what was required of her that after locking the door, as a womanly precaution or a ritual gesture, she would quickly remove all her clothes, as one does before the doctor who is going to examine one, and did not pause in the process unless the 'someone,' not caring for nudity, told her that she might keep on her shift, as specialists do sometimes, who, having an extremely and being afraid of their patient's catching a chill, are satisfied with listening to his breathing and the beating of his heart through his shirt.  On this woman whose whole life, whose every thought, whose entire past and all the men by whom at one time or another she had been had, were to me so utterly unimportant that if she had told me about them I should have listened only out of politeness and scarcely heard what she had said, the anxiety, the torment, the love of Saint-Loup had been concentrated in such a way as to make, out of what was for me a mechanical toy, the cause of endless suffering, the very object and reward of existence.  Seeing these two elements separately (because I had known 'Rachel when from the Lord' in a house of ill fame), I realised that many women for the sake of whom men live, suffer, take their own lives, may be in themselves or for other people what Rachel was for me.  The idea that anyone could be tormented by curiosity with regard to her life amazed me.  I could have told Robert of any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me that most uninteresting things in the world.  And how they would have pained him.  And what had he not given to learn them, without avail!"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 160-161

Whoops.  Robert's mistress, the great love that was causing him such suffering and driving him to the edge of madness, turned out to be the Jewish prostitute, "Rachel when from the Lord," that Proust had met years before in a brothel.  Not surprisingly, Proust is stunned, not only at the coincidence - which seems almost Dickensian - but that Robert would care about such a woman.  Proust's amazement is not based on the fact that she had been a prostitute, because Robert apparently didn't know that, but rather that, at least to Proust, she was so ordinary and boring.  "The idea that anyone could be tormented by curiosity with regard to her life amazed me.  I could have told Robert of any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me that most uninteresting things in the world.  And how they would have pained him."

As we know, love is so idiosyncratic and so malleable and so subjective.  "I realised that many women for the sake of whom men live, suffer, take their own lives, may be in themselves or for other people what Rachel was for me."  How many times in our lives have we found ourselves in Proust's situation?  We're meeting the girl friend or the fiancee of a friend, the one who is "the one," and we realize that we've committed some manner of carnal impropriety with them on a one night stand or a friends with benefit situation.  Essentially, you and the woman, mutually, have whored yourselves out to the other person as part of an exchange, with the very obvious difference that the woman, your friend's great love, had a freedom of action that most women in a brothel would never have.  Still, it was an exchange, and neither or you viewed the other person as anything other than a trading partner.  This is why Proust's clinical description where he compares his trip to the brothel to going to a doctor's office works so brilliantly.  But to your friend, as to Robert, the other person is the stuff of romantic legend.