My Year With Proust - Day 227

"I spite of this we must bear in mind that the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and family, far from being static, save in appearance, are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.  When all the rumours of divorce between couples who have always seemed so perfectly united and will soon afterwards speak of one another with affection; all the terrible things said by one friend of another form whom we supposed him to  be inseparable and with whom we shall find him once more reconciled before we have had time to recovered from our surprise; all the reversals of alliances between nations after the briefest of spells."

   'I say, my uncle and Mme Swann are getting on all right!' remarked Saint-Loup. 'And look at mamma in the innocence of her heart going across to disturb them.  To the pure all things are pure!'"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 278

And the endless cocktail party continues as people have come and gone, and somehow the world has survived the arrival of Mme Swann (who Saint-Loup avoided because, "She's an ex-whore.  Her husband's a Jew, and comes here to pose as a Nationalist.").  Nevertheless, I liked Saint-Loup's comment that, "To the pure all things are pure!"  Actually, it sounds exactly like the comment you'd expect from someone who would not want to meet someone because "She's an ex-whore" and "Her husband's a Jew."  The impure always have such disdain, which I think is actually based on fear, of the pure.  As Machiavelli reminds us, "A man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil."  So, I would argue that the impure actually hate the pure because they fear them, partially because their purity makes them an easy mark and thus difficult to depend upon, but also because the pure possess something that the impure do not; just as the dim hate the intelligent or the boring hate the witty.