" At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case, Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend; in the other, his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet, in that interval of a few hours, I was the same man. "

― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way