Were they Fortuny too?”

“No, I know the ones you mean, they’re made of some gold kid we came across in London, when I was shopping with Consuelo Manchester. It was amazing. I could never make out how they did it, it was just like a golden skin, simply that, with a tiny diamond in front. The poor Duchess of Manchester is dead, but if it’s any help to you I can write and ask Lady Warwick or the Duchess of Marlborough to try and get me some more. I wonder, now, if I haven’t a piece of the stuff left. You might be able to have a pair made here. I shall look for it this evening, and let you know.”

Since I endeavoured as far as possible to leave the Duchess before Albertine had returned, it often happened, because of the hour, that I met in the courtyard as I came away from her door M. de Charlus and Morel on their way to have tea at … Jupien’s, a supreme treat for the Baron! I did not encounter them every day but they went there every day. It may, incidentally, be observed that the regularity of a habit is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity. Really striking things we do as a rule only by fits and starts. But senseless lives, of a kind in which a crackpot deprives himself of all pleasure and inflicts the greatest discomforts upon himself, are those that change least. Every ten years, if we had the curiosity to inquire, we should find the poor wretch still asleep at the hours when he might be living his life, going out at the hours when there is nothing to do but get oneself murdered in the streets, sipping iced drinks when he is hot, still trying desperately to cure a cold. A slight burst of energy, for a single day, would be sufficient to change these habits for good and all. But the fact is that lives of this sort are on the whole peculiar to people who are incapable of energy. Vices are another aspect of these monotonous existences which the exercise of will-power would suffice to render less painful. Both aspects were to be observed simultaneously when M. de Charlus came every day with Morel to have tea at Jupien’s. A single outburst had marred this daily custom. The tailor’s niece having said one day to Morel: “That’s all right then, come tomorrow and I’ll stand you tea,” the Baron had quite justifiably considered this expression very vulgar on the lips of a person whom he regarded as almost a prospective daughter-in-law, but as he enjoyed being offensive and became intoxicated by his own indignation, instead of his simply asking Morel to give her a lesson in refinement, the whole of their homeward walk was a succession of violent scenes. In the most rude and arrogant tone the Baron said: “So your ‘touch’ which, I can see, is not necessarily allied to ‘tact,’ has hindered the normal development of your sense of smell, since you could allow that fetid expression ‘stand you tea’—at fifteen centimes, I suppose—to waft its stench of sewage to my regal nostrils? When you have come to the end of a violin solo, have you ever in my house been rewarded with a fart, instead of frenzied applause or a silence more eloquent still since it is due to fear of being unable to restrain, not what your young woman lavishes upon us, but the sob that you have brought to my lips?”

When a public official has had similar reproaches heaped upon him by his chief, he is invariably sacked next day. Nothing, on the contrary, could have been more painful to M. de Charlus than to dismiss Morel, and, fearing indeed that he had gone a little too far, he began to sing the girl’s praises in the minutest detail, tastefully expressed and unconsciously sprinkled with impertinent observations. “She is charming; as you are a musician, I suppose that she seduced you by her voice, which is very beautiful in the high notes, where she seems to await the accompaniment of your B sharp. Her lower register appeals to me less, and that must bear some relation to the triple rise of her strange and slender throat, which when it seems to have come to an end begins again; but these are trivial details, it is her silhouette that I admire. And as she is a dressmaker and must be handy with her scissors, you must get her to give me a pretty paper cut-out of herself.”

Charlie had paid but little attention to this eulogy, the charms which it extolled in his betrothed having completely escaped his notice. But he said, in reply to M. de Charlus: “That’s all right, my boy, I shall tell her off properly, and she won’t talk like that again.” If Morel addressed M. de Charlus thus as his “boy,” it was not that the handsome violinist was unaware that his own years numbered barely a third of the Baron’s. Nor did he use the expression as Jupien would have done, but with that simplicity which in certain relations postulates that a suppression of the difference in age has tacitly preceded tenderness (a feigned tenderness in Morel’s case, in others a sincere tenderness). Thus, at about this time M.