He did not wish to lose touch with people
who, for all that he knew, might be of use, some day, to Odette, and
thanks to whom he was often, in the meantime, able to procure for her some
privilege or pleasure. Besides, he had been used for so long to the
refinement and comfort of good society that, side by side with his
contempt, there had grown up also a desperate need for it, with the result
that, when he had reached the point after which the humblest lodgings
appeared to him as precisely on a par with the most princely mansions, his
senses were so thoroughly accustomed to the latter that he could not enter
the former without a feeling of acute discomfort. He had the same
regard--to a degree of identity which they would never have suspected--for
the little families with small incomes who asked him to dances in their
flats ("straight upstairs to the fifth floor, and the door on the left")
as for the Princesse de Parme, who gave the most splendid parties in
Paris; but he had not the feeling of being actually 'at the ball' when he
found himself herded with the fathers of families in the bedroom of the
lady of the house, while the spectacle of wash-hand-stands covered over
with towels, and of beds converted into cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats
and great-coats sprawling over their counterpanes, gave him the same
stifling sensation that, nowadays, people who have been used for half a
lifetime to electric light derive from a smoking lamp or a candle that
needs to be snuffed.
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