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Thus, day after day, these excursions in the motor-car followed one another. But once, as I was going up to my room, the lift-boy said to me: “That gentleman has been, he gave me a message for you.” The lift-boy uttered these words in a hoarse croak, coughing and expectorating in my face. “I haven’t half got a cold!” he went on, as though I were incapable of perceiving this for myself. “The doctor says it’s whooping-cough,” and he began once more to cough and expectorate over me. “Don’t tire yourself trying to talk,” I said to him with an air of kindly concern, which was feigned. I was afraid of catching the whooping-cough which, with my tendency to choking spasms, would have been a serious matter for me. But he made it a point of honour, like a virtuoso who refuses to go sick, to go on talking and spitting all the time. “No, it doesn’t matter,” he said (“Perhaps not to you,” I thought, “but to me it does”). “Besides, I shall be returning to Paris soon” (“So much the better, provided he doesn’t give it to me first”). “They say Paris is very superb,” he went on. “It must be even more superb than here or Monte-Carlo, although some of the pages and some of the guests, in fact even head waiters who’ve been to Monte-Carlo for the season have often told me that Paris was not so superb as Monte-Carlo. Perhaps they were being stupid, you’ve got to have your wits about you to be a head waiter—taking all the orders, reserving tables, you need quite a brain. I’ve heard it said that it’s even tougher than writing plays and books.”

We had almost reached my landing when the lift-boy carried me down again to the ground floor because he found that the button was not working properly, and in a moment he had put it right. I told him that I would prefer to walk upstairs, by which I meant, without putting it in so many words, that I preferred not to catch whooping-cough. But with a cordial and contagious burst of coughing the boy thrust me back into the lift. “There’s no danger now, I’ve fixed the button.” Seeing that he was still talking incessantly, and preferring to learn the name of my visitor and the message that he had left rather than the comparative beauties of Balbec, Paris, and Monte-Carlo, I said to him (as one might say to a tenor who is wearying one with Benjamin Godard, “Won’t you sing me some Debussy?”) “But who is the person who called to see me?” “It’s the gentleman you went out with yesterday. I’ll go and fetch his card, it’s with my porter.” As, the day before, I had dropped Robert de Saint-Loup at Doncières station before going to meet Albertine, I supposed that the lift-boy was referring to him, but it was the chauffeur. And by describing him in the words: “The gentleman you went out with,” he taught me at the same time that a working man is just as much a gentleman as a man about town. A lesson in the use of words only. For in point of fact I had never made any distinction between the classes. And if, on hearing a chauffeur called a gentleman, I had felt the same astonishment as Count X who had only held that rank for a week and who, when I said “the Countess looks tired,” turned his head round to see who I was talking about, it was simply because I was unaccustomed to that particular usage; I had never made any distinction between working people, the middle classes and the nobility, and I should have been equally ready to make any of them my friends. With a certain preference for working people, and after them for the nobility, not because I liked them better but because I knew that one could expect greater courtesy from them towards working people than one finds among the middle classes, either because the nobility are less disdainful or else because they are naturally polite to anybody, as beautiful women are glad to bestow a smile which they know will be joyfully welcomed. I cannot however pretend that this habit that I had of putting people of humble station on a level with people in society, even if it was quite understood by the latter,