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“So you’d rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.

“Oh, Robert, it’s cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I answered. “You know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be over there.”

“Well, you flatter me!” he replied. “Because it actually occurred to me that you’d rather stay here tonight. And that is precisely what I went to ask the Captain.”

“And he has given you leave?” I cried.

“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”

“Oh! I adore him!”

“No, that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I turned away to hide my tears.

We were several times interrupted by the entry of one or other of Saint-Loup’s comrades. He drove them all out again.

“Get out of here. Buzz off!”

I begged him to let them stay.

“No, really, they would bore you stiff. They’re absolutely uncouth people who can talk of nothing but racing or stable shop. Besides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these precious moments I’ve been looking forward to. Mind you, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, it isn’t that everything military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have a major here who’s an admirable man. He’s given us a course in which military history is treated like a demonstration, like a problem in algebra. Even from the aesthetic point of view there’s a curious beauty, alternately inductive and deductive, about it which you couldn’t fail to appreciate.”

“That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here tonight?”

“No, thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service is the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He’s perfect at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends hours with the senior sergeant and the master tailor. There you have his mentality. Besides, he has a vast contempt, like everyone here, for the excellent major in question, whom no one speaks to because he’s a freemason and doesn’t go to confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have an outsider like that in his house. Which is pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and done, from a man whose great-grandfather was a small farmer, and who would probably be a small farmer himself if it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars. Not that he isn’t a little aware of his own rather ambiguous position in society, neither flesh nor fowl. He hardly ever shows his face at the Jockey, it makes him feel so deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,” added Robert, who, having been led by the same spirit of imitation to adopt the social theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives, unconsciously combined a democratic love of humanity with a contempt for the nobility of the Empire.

I looked at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought that, since Saint-Loup had this photograph in his possession, he might perhaps give it to me, made me cherish him all the more and long to do him a thousand services, which seemed to me a very small exchange for it. For this photograph was like a supplementary encounter added to all those that I had already had with Mme de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by a sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that rounded cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory); and the contemplation of them, as well as of the bare throat and arms of a woman whom I had never seen save in a high-necked and long-sleeved dress, was to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless favour. Those forms, which had seemed to me almost a forbidden spectacle, I could study there as in a text-book of the only geometry that had any value for me. Later on, looking at Robert, it struck me that he too was a little like the photograph of his aunt, by a mysterious process which I found almost