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Saint-Loup, who was due to come to Paris, had promised to take me to Mme de Villeparisis’s, where I hoped, though I had not said so to him, that we might meet Mme de Guermantes. He invited me to lunch in a restaurant with his mistress, whom we were afterwards to accompany to a rehearsal. We were to go out in the morning and call for her at her home on the outskirts of Paris.

I had asked Saint-Loup if the restaurant to which we went for lunch (in the lives of young noblemen with money to spend the restaurant plays as important a part as do bales of merchandise in Arabian tales) could for preference be the one to which Aimé had told me that he would be going as head waiter until the Balbec season opened. It was a great attraction to me who dreamed of so many journeys and made so few to see again someone who formed part not merely of my memories of Balbec but of Balbec itself, who went there year after year and, when ill health or my studies compelled me to stay in Paris, would be watching just the same, during the long July afternoons while he waited for the guests to come in to dinner, the sun creep down the sky and set in the sea, through the glass panels of the great dining-room behind which, at the hour when the light died, the motionless wings of vessels, smoky blue in the distance, looked like exotic and nocturnal butterflies in a show-case. Himself magnetised by his contact with the powerful lodestone of Balbec, this head waiter became in turn a magnet for me. I hoped by talking to him to enter in advance into communication with Balbec, to have realised here in Paris something of the delights of travel.

I set out first thing, leaving Françoise at home to moan over the affianced footman who had once again been prevented, the evening before, from going to see his betrothed. Françoise had found him in tears; he had been itching to go and strike the porter, but had restrained himself, for he valued his place.

Before reaching Saint-Loup’s, where he was to be waiting for me at the door, I ran into Legrandin, of whom we had lost sight since our Combray days, and who, though now quite grey, had preserved his air of youthful candour. Seeing me, he stopped.

“Ah! so it’s you,” he exclaimed, “a man of fashion, and in a frock-coat too! That is a livery in which my independent spirit would be ill at ease. It is true that you are a man of the world, I suppose, and go out paying calls! In order to go and meditate, as I do, beside some half-ruined tomb, my bow-tie and jacket are not out of place. You know how I admire the charming quality of your soul; that is why I tell you how deeply I regret that you should go forth and betray it among the Gentiles. By being capable of remaining for a moment in the nauseating atmosphere of the salons—for me, unbreathable—you pronounce on your own future the condemnation, the damnation of the Prophet. I can see it all: you frequent the frivolous-minded, the gracious livers—that is the vice of our contemporary bourgeoisie. Ah, those aristocrats! The Terror was greatly to blame for not cutting the heads off every one of them. They are all disreputable scum, when they are not simply dreary idiots. Still, my poor boy, if that sort of thing amuses you! While you are on your way to some tea-party your old friend will be more fortunate than you, for alone in an outlying suburb he will be watching the pink moon rise in a violet sky. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this earth upon which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the law of gravity to hold me here, to keep me from escaping into another sphere. I belong to a different planet. Good-bye; do not take amiss the old-time frankness of the peasant of the Vivonne, who has also remained a peasant of the Danube. To prove my sincere regard for you, I shall send you my latest novel. But you will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin de siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest. What you want is Bergotte, you have confessed it, gamy stuff for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries. I