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By Root 1608 0

she was to clear off at once. M. de Charlus observed with ecstasy this authoritative, virile gesture, wielded by the graceful hand for which it ought still to have been too weighty, too massively brutal, with a precocious firmness and suppleness which gave to this still beardless adolescent the air of a young David capable of challenging Goliath. The Baron’s admiration was unconsciously blended with the sort of smile with which we observe in a child an expression of gravity beyond his years. “There’s somebody I should like to have to accompany me on my travels and help me in my business. How he would simplify my life,” M. de Charlus said to himself.

The train for Paris started, without M. de Charlus. Then Albertine and I took our seats in our own train, without my discovering what had become of M. de Charlus and Morel. “We must never quarrel any more, I beg your pardon again,” Albertine said to me, alluding to the Saint-Loup incident. “We must always be nice to each other,” she added tenderly. “As for your friend Saint-Loup, if you think that I’m the least bit interested in him, you’re quite mistaken. All that I like about him is that he seems so very fond of you.” “He’s a very good fellow,” I said, taking care not to attribute to Robert those imaginary excellences which I should not have failed to invent, out of friendship for him, had I been with anybody but Albertine. “He’s an excellent creature, frank, devoted, loyal, someone you can rely on in any circumstances.” In saying this I confined myself, restrained by my jealousy, to speaking the truth about Saint-Loup, but what I said was indeed the truth. But it expressed itself in precisely the same terms as Mme de Villeparisis had used in speaking to me of him, when I did not yet know him, imagined him to be so different, so proud, and said to myself: “People think him kind because he’s a blue-blooded nobleman.”In the same way, when she had said to me: “He would be so pleased,” I thought to myself, after seeing him outside the hotel preparing to take the reins, that his aunt’s words had been mere social banality, intended to flatter me. And I had realised afterwards that she had spoken sincerely, thinking of the things that interested me, of my reading, and because she knew that that was what Saint-Loup liked, as it was later to happen to me to say sincerely to somebody who was writing a history of his ancestor La Rochefoucauld, the author of the Maximes, and wished to consult Robert about him: “He will be so pleased.” It was simply that I had learned to know him. But, when I set eyes on him for the first time, I had not supposed that an intelligence akin to my own could be enveloped in so much outward elegance of dress and attitude. By his feathers I had judged him to be a bird of another species. It was Albertine now who, perhaps a little because Saint-Loup, out of kindness to myself, had been so cold to her, said to me what I had once thought: “Ah, he’s as devoted as all that! I notice that people are invariably credited with all the virtues when they belong to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” And yet, the fact that Saint-Loup belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain was something I had never once thought of again in the course of all these years in which, stripping himself of his prestige, he had demonstrated his virtues to me. Such a change of perspective in looking at other people, more striking already in friendship than in merely social relations, is all the more striking still in love, where desire so enlarges the scale, so magnifies the proportions of the slightest signs of coldness, that it had required far less than Saint-Loup had shown at first sight for me to believe myself disdained at first by Albertine, to imagine her friends as fabulously inhuman creatures, and to ascribe Elstir’s judgment, when he said to me of the little band with exactly the same sentiment as Mme de Villeparisis speaking of Saint-Loup: “They’re good girls,” simply to the indulgence people have for beauty and a certain elegance. Yet was this not the verdict I would automatically have expressed