de Charlus was intolerable to me. I would have liked to warn him, but did not know how to do it. “The spectacle of all that laborious little world is very pleasant to an old stick like myself. I do not know them,” he went on, raising his hand with an air of reserve⁠—so as not to appear to be boasting of his own conquests, to testify to his own purity and not to allow any suspicion to rest upon that of the students⁠—“but they are most civil, they often go so far as to keep a place for me, since I am a very old gentleman. Yes indeed, my dear boy, do not protest, I am past forty,” said the Baron, who was past sixty. “It is a trifle stuffy in the hall in which Brichot lectures, but it is always interesting.” Albeit the Baron preferred to mingle with the youth of the schools, in other words to be jostled by them, sometimes, to save him a long wait in the lecture-room, Brichot took him in by his own door.