My Year With Proust - Day 340

   "What were we talking about?  Oh yes, that big, fair girl, Mme Putbut's maid.  She goes woth women too, but I don't suppose you mind that.  I tell you frankly, I've never seen such a gorgeous creatures."  "I imagine her as being rather Giorgionesque?" "Wildly Giorgionesque!  Oh, if I only had a little time in Paris, what wonderful things there are to be done!  And then one goes on to the next.  Because love is all rot, you know, I've finished with all that."

   I soon discovered, to my surprise, that he had equally finished with literature, whereas it was merely with regard to literary men that he had struck me as being disillusioned at our last meeting. ("They're practically all a pack of scoundrels," he had said to me, a remark that was to be explained by his justified resentment towards certain of Rachel's friends.  For they had persuaded her that she would never have any talent if she allowed "Robert, scion of an alien race" to acquire an influence over her, and with her used to make fun of him, to his face, at the dinners he gave for them.) But in reality Robert's love of Letters was in no sense profound, did not spring from his true nature, was only a by-product of his love of Rachel, and had faded with the latter at the same time as his loathing for voluptuaries and his religious respect for the virtue of women.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plains, p. 721

While Robert's former mistress, Rachel, may have begun her career as a prostitute, she clearly made him a more accomplished and sophisticated thinker, at least as long as they were together.  His "love" of literature disappeared as soon as their affair ended, as it was only a byproduct of trying to impress her.  His desperate desire to prove that he was clearly over heard probably explains his plan to drag Marcel off to a brothel, which, of course, has its own ironic twist.  I like the moniker, "Robert, scion of an alien race," and plan of attaching it to one of my friends as soon as possible.