“Fishing for compliments” with Marcel Proust

I came across an English expression in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913): "'Puisque vous le voulez', répondit Odette sur un ton de marivaudage, et elle ajouta: vous savez que je ne suis pas 'fishing for compliments.'" I would have thought that "fishing for compliments" was too recent to be used in a scene taking place in nineteenth-century France, but the entry for this sense of "fish" in the "Oxford English Dictionary" includes the phrase in an 1803 quotation: "I feared he would think I was fishing for a compliment." And the general figurative sense of "fish" of trying to indirectly "elicit a particular response" goes back to 1570. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 May 2024)