Page 417 - swanns-way

Bois and especially at Saint-Cloud, he would go to dine in
one of those fashionable houses in which, at one time, he
had been a constant guest. He did not wish to lose touch
with people who, for all that he knew, might be of use, some
day, to Odette, and thanks to whom he was often, in the
meantime, able to procure for her some privilege or plea-
sure. Besides, he had been used for so long to the refinement
and comfort of good society that, side by side with his con-
tempt, there had grown up also a desperate need for it, with
the result that, when he had reached the point after which
the humblest lodgings appeared to him as precisely on a par
with the most princely mansions, his senses were so thor-
oughly accustomed to the latter that he could not enter the
former without a feeling of acute discomfort. He had the
same regard—to a degree of identity which they would nev-
er have suspected—for the little families with small incomes
who asked him to dances in their flats (“straight upstairs to
the fifth floor, and the door on the left’) as for the Princesse
de Parme, who gave the most splendid parties in Paris; but
he had not the feeling of being actually ‘at the ball’ when
he found himself herded with the fathers of families in the
bedroom of the lady of the house, while the spectacle of
wash-hand-stands covered over with towels, and of beds
converted into cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats and great-
coats sprawling over their counterpanes, gave him the same
stifling sensation that, nowadays, people who have been
used for half a lifetime to electric light derive from a smok-
ing lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were
dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven;

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