or merely reading it. Wherein busy men show a want of reflection. For the disinterested culture which seems to them a comic pastime of idle people at the moment when they find them engaged in it is, they ought to remember, the same that in their own profession brings to the fore men who may not be better magistrates or administrators than themselves but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: “It appears he’s a great reader, a most distinguished individual.” But above all the chief magistrate did not take into account that what pleased me about these dinners at la Raspelière was that, as he himself said quite rightly, though as a criticism, they “meant a regular journey,” a journey whose charm appeared to me all the more thrilling in that it was not an object in itself, and no one made any attempt to find pleasure in it⁠—that being reserved for the party for which we were bound, and greatly modified by all the atmosphere that surrounded it. It was already night now when I exchanged the warmth of the hotel⁠—the hotel that had become my home⁠—for the railway carriage into which I climbed with Albertine, in which a glimmer of lamplight on the window showed, at certain halts of the panting little train, that we had arrived at a station.