The rooms are quite attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there is something reassuring about that.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure that an attractive house could give was superficial, almost nonexistent, and could not calm my growing anguish, as painful as that which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which smelt of flowering grasses. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed gaze.

“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about tapestries which you won’t have the heart to look at, even. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most enlivening, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand; I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”