On our homeward drive, in the confined space of the coupé, the red shoes were of necessity very close to mine, and Mme. de Guermantes, fearing that she might actually have touched me, said to the Duke: “This young man will have to say to me, like the person in the caricature: ‘Madame, tell me at once that you love me, but don’t tread on my feet like that.’ ” My thoughts, however, were far from Mme. de Guermantes. Ever since Saint-Loup had spoken to me of a young girl of good family who frequented a house of ill-fame, and of the Baroness Putbus’s maid, it was in these two persons that were coalesced and embodied the desires inspired in me day by day by countless beauties of two classes, on the one hand the plebeian and magnificent, the majestic lady’s maids of great houses, swollen with pride and saying “we” when they spoke of Duchesses, on the other hand those girls of whom it was enough for me sometimes, without even having seen them go past in carriages or on foot, to have read the names in the account of a ball for me to fall in love with them and, having conscientiously searched the yearbook for the country houses in which they spent the summer (as often as not letting myself be led astray by a similarity of names), to dream alternately of going to live amid the plains of the West, the sandhills of the North, the pine-forests of the South. But in vain might I fuse together all the most exquisite fleshly matter to compose, after the ideal outline traced for me by Saint-Loup, the young girl of easy virtue and Mme. Putbus’s maid, my two possessible beauties still lacked what I should never know until I had seen them: individual character. I was to wear myself out in seeking to form a mental picture, during the months in which I would have preferred a lady’s maid, of the maid of Mme. Putbus. But what peace of mind after having been perpetually troubled by my restless desires, for so many fugitive creatures whose very names I often did not know, who were in any case so hard to find again, harder still to become acquainted with, impossible perhaps to captivate, to have subtracted from all that scattered, fugitive, anonymous beauty, two choice specimens duly labelled, whom I was at least certain of being able to procure when I chose. I kept putting off the hour for devoting myself to this twofold pleasure, as I put off that for beginning to work, but the certainty of having it whenever I chose dispensed me almost from the necessity of taking it, like those soporific tablets which one has only to have within reach of one’s hand not to need them and to fall asleep. In the whole universe I desired only two women, of whose faces I could not, it is true, form any picture, but whose names Saint-Loup had told me and had guaranteed their consent. So that, if he had, by what he had said this evening, set my imagination a heavy task, he had at the same time procured an appreciable relaxation, a prolonged rest for my will.
“Well!” said the Duchess to me, “apart from your balls, can’t I be of any use to you? Have you found a house where you would like me to introduce you?” I replied that I was afraid the only one that tempted me was hardly fashionable enough for her. “Whose is that?” she asked in a hoarse and menacing voice, scarcely opening her lips. “Baroness Putbus.” This time she pretended to be really angry. “No, not that! I believe you’re trying to make a fool of me. I don’t even know how I come to have heard the creature’s name. But she is the dregs of society. It’s just as though you were to ask me for an introduction to my milliner. And worse than that, for my milliner is charming. You are a little bit cracked, my poor boy. In any case, I beg that you will be polite to the people to whom I have introduced you, leave cards on them, and go and see them, and not talk to them about Baroness Putbus of whom they have never heard.” I asked whether Mme. d’Orvillers was not inclined to be flighty. “Oh, not in the least, you are thinking of someone else, why, she’s rather a prude, if anything. Ain’t she, Basin?” “Yes, in any case I don’t think there has ever been anything to be said about her,” said the Duke.
“You won’t come with us to the ball?” he asked me. “I can lend you a Venetian cloak and I know someone who will be damned glad to see you there—Oriane for one, that I needn’t say—but the Princesse de Parme. She’s never tired of singing your praises, and swears by you alone. It’s fortunate for you—since she is a trifle mature—that she is the model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have chosen you as a sigisbee, as it was called in my young days, a sort
