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Whenever the Princess was expecting a visit from me, since she knew that I often saw M. de Charlus, she would evidently prepare in advance a certain number of questions which she then put to me adroitly enough for me not to detect what lay behind them and which must have been aimed at verifying whether such and such an assertion, such and such an excuse by M. de Charlus in connexion with a certain address or a certain evening, were true or not. Sometimes, throughout my entire visit, she would not ask me a single question, however insignificant it might have appeared, and would try to draw my attention to this. Then, having said good-bye to me, she would suddenly, on the doorstep, ask me five or six as though without premeditation. So it went on, until one evening she sent for me. I found her in a state of extraordinary agitation, scarcely able to hold back her tears. She asked if she could entrust me with a letter for M. de Charlus and begged me to deliver it to him at all costs. I hurried round to his house, where I found him in front of the mirror wiping a few specks of powder from his face. He perused the letter—the most desperate appeal, I later learned—and asked me to reply that it was physically impossible that evening, that he was ill. While he was talking to me, he plucked from a vase one after another a number of roses each of a different hue, tried them in his buttonhole, and looked in the mirror to see how they matched his complexion, without being able to decide on any of them. His valet came in to announce that the barber had arrived, and the Baron held out his hand to say good-bye to me. “But he’s forgotten his curling tongs,” said the valet. The Baron flew into a terrible rage; only the unsightly flush which threatened to ruin his complexion persuaded him to calm down a little, though he remained plunged in an even more bitter despair than before because not only would his hair be less wavy than it might have been but his face would be redder and his nose shiny with sweat. “He can go and get them,” suggested the valet. “But I haven’t the time,” wailed the Baron in an ululation calculated to produce as terrifying an effect as the most violent rage while generating less heat in him who emitted it. “I haven’t the time,” he moaned. “I must leave in half an hour or I shall miss everything.” “Would Monsieur le Baron like him to come in, then?” “I don’t know, I can’t do without a touch of the curling tongs. Tell him he’s a brute, a scoundrel. Tell him . . .”

At this point I left and hurried back to the Princess. Her breast heaving with emotion, she scribbled another message and asked me to go round to him again: “I’m taking advantage of your friendship, but if you only knew why . . .” I returned to M. de Charlus. Just before reaching his house, I saw him join Jupien beside a parked cab. The headlights of a passing car lit up for a moment the peaked cap and the face of a bus conductor. Then I could see him no longer, for the cab had been halted in a dark corner near the entrance to a completely unlit cul-de-sac. I turned into this cul-de-sac so that M. de Charlus should not see me.

“Give me a second before I get in,” M. de Charlus said to Jupien. “My moustache isn’t ruffled?”

“No, you look superb.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Don’t use such expressions, they don’t suit you. They’re all right for the fellow you’re going to see.”

“Ah, so he’s a bit loutish! I’m not averse to that. But tell me, what sort of man is he, not too skinny?”

I realised from all this that if M. de Charlus was failing to go to the help of a glorious princess who was wild with grief, it was not for the sake of a rendezvous with someone he loved, or even desired, but of an arranged introduction to someone he had never met before.

“No, he isn’t skinny; in fact he’s rather plump and fleshy. Don’t worry, he’s just your type, you’ll see, you’ll be very pleased with him, my little lambkin,” Jupien added, employing a form of address which seemed as personally inappropriate, as ritual, as when the Russians call a passer-by “little father.”

He got