existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left our house in
Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no sooner have turned
the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and be off to some
drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had
ever set eyes--that would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as, to a
woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy
with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would, when he had finished his
conversation with her, plunge deep into the realms of Thetis, into an
empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which Virgil depicts him as being
received with open arms; or--to be content with an image more likely to
have occurred to her, for she had seen it painted on the plates we used
for biscuits at Combray--as the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba,
who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way
into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.

One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had begged
pardon for being in evening clothes, Francoise, when he had gone, told us
that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining "with a
princess." "A pretty sort of princess," drawled my aunt; "I know them,"
and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting,
serenely ironical.

Altogether, my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony. Since she was
of the opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations, she
thought it only right and proper that he should never come to see us in
summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden, and
that from each of his visits to Italy he should bring back some
photographs of old masters for me.

It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send to him whenever we wanted a