But how much were my sufferings increased when we had finally landed in the hall of the Grand Hotel at Balbec, and I stood there in front of the monumental staircase that looked like marble, while my grandmother, regardless of the growing hostility of the strangers among whom we should have to live, discussed “terms” with the manager, a sort of nodding mandarin whose face and voice were alike covered with scars (left by the excision of countless pustules from one and from the other of the divers accents acquired from an alien ancestry and in a cosmopolitan upbringing) who stood there in a smart dinner jacket, with the air of an expert psychologist, classifying, whenever the “omnibus” discharged a fresh load, the “nobility and gentry” as “geesers” and the “hotel crooks” as nobility and gentry. Forgetting, probably, that he himself was not drawing five hundred francs a month, he had a profound contempt for people to whom five hundred francs⁠—or, as he preferred to put it, “twenty-five louis” was “a lot of money,” and regarded them as belonging to a race of pariahs for whom the Grand Hotel was certainly not intended.