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“Now he’s gone to the other extreme. So a man no longer has the right to have friends? Ah! youth; it gets everything wrong. We shall have to begin your education over again, my boy. Now,” he went on, “I admit that this case—and I know of many others—however open a mind I may try to keep for every form of effrontery, does embarrass me. I may be very old-fashioned, but I fail to understand,” he said in the tone of an old Gallican speaking of certain forms of Ultramontanism, of a liberal royalist speaking of the Action Française or of a disciple of Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists. “I don’t condemn these innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t. If they’re so passionately fond of women, why, and especially in this working-class world where it’s frowned upon, where they conceal it from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? It’s because it represents something else to them. What?”

“What else can a woman represent to Albertine,” I thought, and there indeed lay the cause of my anguish.

“Decidedly, Baron,” said Brichot, “should the University Council ever think of founding a Chair of Homosexuality, I shall see that your name is the first to be submitted. Or rather, no; an Institute of Special Psychophysiology would suit you better. And I can see you, best of all, provided with a Chair in the College de France, which would enable you to devote yourself to personal researches the results of which you would deliver, like the Professor of Tamil or Sanskrit, to the handful of people who are interested in them. You would have an audience of two, with your beadle, not that I mean to cast the slightest aspersion upon our corps of ushers, whom I believe to be above suspicion.”

“You know nothing about it,” the Baron retorted in a harsh and cutting tone. “Besides you’re wrong in thinking that so few people are interested in the subject. It’s just the opposite.” And without stopping to consider the incompatibility between the invariable trend of his own conversation and the reproaches he was about to level at others, “It is, on the contrary, most alarming,” said the Baron with a shocked and contrite air, “people talk about nothing else. It’s a disgrace, but I’m not exaggerating, my dear fellow! It appears that the day before yesterday, at the Duchesse d’Ayen’s, they talked about nothing else for two hours on end. Just imagine, if women have taken to discussing that sort of thing, it’s a positive scandal! The most revolting thing about it,” he went on with extraordinary fire and vigour, “is that they get their information from pests, real scoundrels like young Châtellerault, about whom there’s more to be told than anyone, who tell them stories about other men. I gather he’s been vilifying me, but I don’t care; I’m convinced that the mud and filth flung by an individual who barely escaped being turned out of the Jockey for cheating at cards can only rebound on him. I know that if I were Jane d’Ayen, I should have sufficient respect for my salon not to allow such subjects to be discussed there, nor to allow my own flesh and blood to be dragged through the mire in my house. But society’s finished, there are no longer any rules, any proprieties, in conversation any more than in dress. Ah, my dear fellow, it’s the end of the world. Everyone has become so malicious. People vie with one another in speaking ill of their fellows. It’s appalling!”

As cowardly still as I had been long ago in my boyhood at Combray when I used to run away in order not to see my grandfather tempted with brandy and the vain efforts of my grandmother imploring him not to drink it, I had but one thought, which was to leave the Verdurins’ house before the execution of M. de Charlus occurred.

“I simply must go,” I said to Brichot.

“I’m coming with you,” he replied, “but we can’t just slip away, English fashion. Come and say good-bye to Mme Verdurin,” the Professor concluded, as he made his way to the drawing-room with the air of a man who,