of revealing to Robert the secret that I had discovered, but irritated, nevertheless, at hearing him maintain an erroneous theory with such smug assurance. He merely shrugged his shoulders in response to what he took for ingenuousness on my part. “Not that I blame him in the least, I consider that he’s perfectly right.” And he proceeded to outline to me a theory of conduct that would have horrified him at Balbec (where he was not content with branding seducers, death seeming to him the only punishment adequate to their crime). Then, however, he had still been in love and jealous. Now he even went so far as to sing the praises of houses of assignation. “They’re the only places where you can find a shoe to fit you, sheathe your weapon, as we say in the Army.” He no longer felt for places of that sort the disgust that had inflamed him at Balbec when I made an allusion to them, and hearing what he now said, I told him that Bloch had introduced me to one, but Robert replied that the one which Bloch frequented must be “pretty vile, a poor man’s paradise!—It all depends, though: where was it?” I remained vague, for I had just remembered that it was there that Rachel whom Robert had so passionately loved used to give herself for a louis. “Anyhow, I can take you to some far better ones, full of stunning women.” Hearing me express the desire that he should take me as soon as possible to the ones he knew, which must indeed be far superior to the house to which Bloch had introduced me, he expressed sincere regret that he would be unable to do so on this occasion as he was leaving Paris next day. “It will have to be my next leave,” he said. “You’ll see, there are young girls there, even,” he added with an air of mystery. “There’s a little Mademoiselle de . . . I think it’s d’Orgeville—I can let you have the exact name—who is the daughter of quite tip-top people; her mother was by way of being a La Croix-l’Evêque, and they’re really out of the top drawer—in fact they’re more or less related, if I’m not mistaken, to my aunt Oriane. Anyhow, you have only to see the child to realise at once that she must be somebody’s daughter” (I could detect, hovering for a moment over Robert’s voice, the shadow of the Guermantes family genie, which passed like a cloud, but at a great height and without stopping). “She looks to me a marvellous proposition. The parents are always ill and can’t look after her. Gad, the child must have some amusement, and I count upon you to provide it!” “Oh, when are you coming back?” “I don’t know. If you don’t absolutely insist upon duchesses” (duchess being for the aristocracy the only title that denotes a particularly brilliant rank, as the lower orders talk of “princesses”), “in a different class of goods there’s Mme Putbus’s chambermaid.”
At this moment, Mme de Surgis entered the room in search of her sons. As soon as he saw her M. de Charlus went up to her with a friendliness by which the Marquise was all the more agreeably surprised in that an icy coldness was what she had expected from the Baron, who had always posed as Oriane’s protector and alone of the family—the rest being too often inclined to indulgence towards the Duke’s irregularities because of his wealth and from jealousy of the Duchess—kept his brother’s mistresses ruthlessly at a distance. And so Mme de Surgis would have fully understood the motives for the attitude that she dreaded to find in the Baron, but never for a moment suspected those for the wholly different welcome that she did receive from him. He spoke to her with admiration of the portrait that Jacquet had painted of her years before. This admiration waxed indeed to an enthusiasm which, if it was partly calculating, with the object of preventing the Marquise from going away, of “engaging” her, as Robert used to say of enemy armies whose forces one wants to keep tied down at a particular point, was also perhaps sincere. For, if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in