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By Root 1488 0

ill-bred people a lesson, said: “I think it’s high time we began to talk of subjects that might interest this young lady.” But I realised that, for him, the young lady was not Albertine but Morel, and he confirmed, later on, the accuracy of my interpretation by the expressions he employed when he begged that there might be no more such conversations in front of Morel. “You know,” he said to me, speaking of the violinist, “he’s not at all what you might suppose, he’s a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved.” One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet “serious” of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl.

Then Brichot, to change the subject, asked me whether I intended to remain much longer at Incarville. Although I had pointed out to him more than once that I was staying not at Incarville but at Balbec, he always repeated the mistake, for it was by the name of Incarville or Balbec-Incarville that he referred to this section of the coast. One often finds people speaking thus about the same things as oneself by a slightly different name. A certain lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain used invariably to ask me, when she meant to refer to the Duchesse de Guermantes, whether I had seen Zénaïde lately, or Oriane-Zénaïde, so that at first I did not understand her. Probably there had been a time when, some relative of Mme de Guermantes being named Oriane, she herself, to avoid confusion, had been known as Oriane-Zénaïde. Perhaps, too, there had originally been a station only at Incarville, from which one went on by carriage to Balbec.

“Why, what have you been talking about?” said Albertine, astonished at the solemn, paternal tone which M. de Charlus had suddenly adopted.

“About Balzac,” the Baron hastily replied, “and you are wearing this evening the very same costume as the Princesse de Cadignan, not the first, which she wears at the dinner-party, but the second.”

This coincidence was due to the fact that, in choosing Albertine’s clothes, I drew my inspiration from the taste that she had acquired thanks to Elstir, who had a liking for the sort of sobriety that might have been called British had it not been tempered with a softness that was purely French. As a rule the clothes he preferred offered to the eye a harmonious combination of grey tones, like the dress of Diane de Cadignan. M. de Charlus was almost the only person capable of appreciating Albertine’s clothes at their true value; his eye detected at a glance what constituted their rarity, their worth; he would never have mistaken one material for another, and could always recognise the maker. But he preferred—in women—a little more brightness and colour than Elstir would allow. And so, that evening, Albertine glanced at me with a half-smiling, half-apprehensive expression, wrinkling her little pink cat’s nose. Meeting over her skirt of grey crêpe de chine, her jacket of grey cheviot did indeed give the impression that she was dressed entirely in grey. But, signing to me to help her, because her puffed sleeves needed to be smoothed down or pulled up for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took it off, and as these sleeves were of a Scottish plaid in soft colours, pink, pale blue, dull green, pigeon’s breast, the effect was as though in a grey sky a rainbow had suddenly appeared. And she wondered whether this would find favour with M. de Charlus.

“Ah!” he exclaimed in delight, “now we have a ray, a prism of colour. I offer you my sincerest compliments.”

“But it’s this gentleman who has earned them,” Albertine replied politely, pointing to myself, for she liked to show off what she had received from me.

“It’s only the women who don’t know how to dress that are afraid of colours,” went on M. de Charlus. “One can be brilliant without vulgarity and soft without being dull. Besides, you have not the same reasons as Mme de Cadignan for wishing to appear detached from life, for that