for that matter is extremely subtle, the additional savour which spicy revelations added, for Sainte-Beuve, to the insufficiently confidential writings of Chateaubriand. From our colleague, whose wisdom is golden but who had little money, the telegraph-boy passed into the hands of the Baron, ‘with the most honourable intentions’ (you should have heard his voice when he said it). And as this Satan is the most obliging of men, he found his protégé a post in the Colonies, from which the young man, who has a sense of gratitude, sends him from time to time the most excellent fruit. The Baron offers these to his distinguished friends; some of the young man’s pineapples appeared quite recently on the table at the Quai Conti, causing Mme Verdurin to remark, with no malicious intent: ‘You must have an uncle or a nephew in America, M. de Charlus, to get pineapples like these!’ I admit that I ate them with a certain gaiety, reciting to myself the opening lines of a Horatian ode which Diderot loved to recall. In fact, like my colleague Boissier, strolling from the Palatine to Tibur, I derive from the Baron’s conversation a singularly more vivid and more savoury idea of the writers of the Augustan age, without mentioning those of the Decadence, or harking back to the Greeks, although I once said to the excellent Baron that in his company I felt like Plato in the house of Aspasia. To tell the truth, I had considerably enlarged the scale of the two characters and, as La Fontaine says, my example was taken ‘from smaller animals.’ However that may be, you do not, I imagine, suppose that the Baron took offence. Never have I seen him so ingenuously delighted. A childish excitement caused him to depart from his aristocratic phlegm. ‘What flatterers all these Sorbonnards are!’ he exclaimed with rapture. ‘To think that I should have had to wait until my age before being compared to Aspasia! An old fright like me! Oh, my youth!’ I should have loved you to see him as he said this, outrageously powdered as he always is, and, at his age, scented like a young fop. All the same, beneath his genealogical obsessions, the best fellow in the world. For all these reasons, I should be distressed were this evening’s rupture to prove final. What did surprise me was the way in which the young man turned on him. His manner towards the Baron has been, for some time past, that of a henchman, of a feudal vassal, which scarcely betokened such an insurrection. I hope that, in any event, even if (quod di omen avertant) the Baron were never to return to the Quai Conti, this schism will not extend to me. Each of us derives too much benefit from the exchange that we make of my feeble stock of learning with his experience.” (We shall see that if M. de Charlus showed no violent rancour towards Brichot, at any rate his affection for the Professor vanished so completely as to allow him to judge him without indulgence.) “And I swear to you that the exchange is so much in my favour that when the Baron yields up to me what his life has taught him, I am unable to endorse the opinion of Sylvestre Bonnard that a library is still the best place in which to ponder the dream of life.”
We had now reached my door. I got out of the carriage to give the driver Brichot’s address. From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine’s room, that window, formerly quite black at night when she had not been staying in the house, which the electric light from inside, segmented by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold. This magic scroll, clear as it was to myself, tracing before my tranquil mind precise images, near at hand, of which I should presently be taking possession, was invisible to Brichot who had remained in the carriage and was almost blind, and would in any case have been incomprehensible to him since, like the friends who called on me before dinner, when Albertine had returned from her drive, the Professor was unaware that a girl who was all my own was waiting for me in a bedroom adjoining mine. The carriage drove off. I remained for