In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (11 page)

Perhaps she was dimly conscious that my game had another object than the one I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I had attained it. And I who was afraid that she had noticed (and a slight movement of recoil and constraint as of offended modesty which she made and checked a moment later made me think that my fear had not been unfounded) agreed to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed had no other object in view than the one after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side.

On my way home I perceived, I suddenly recalled the impression, concealed from me until then, of which, without letting me distinguish or recognise it, the cold and almost sooty smell of the trellised pavilion had reminded me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe’s little sitting-room at Combray, which had indeed exhaled the same odour of humidity. But I could not understand, and I postponed until later the attempt to discover why the recollection of so trivial an impression had filled me with such happiness. Meanwhile it struck me that I did indeed deserve the contempt of M. de Norpois: I had preferred hitherto to all other writers one whom he styled a mere “flute-player,” and a positive rapture had been conveyed to me, not by some important idea, but by a musty smell.

For some time past, in certain households, the name of the Champs-Elysées, if a visitor mentioned it, would be greeted by the mothers with that baleful air which they reserve for a physician of established reputation whom they claim to have seen make too many false diagnoses to have any faith left in him; people insisted that these gardens were not good for children, that they knew of more than one sore throat, more than one case of measles and any number of feverish chills for which they must be held responsible. Without venturing openly to doubt the maternal affection of Mamma, who continued to let me play there, several of her friends deplored her inability to see what was as plain as daylight.

Neurotic subjects are perhaps less addicted than any, despite the time-honoured phrase, to “listening to their insides”: they hear so many things going on by which they realise later that they were wrong to let themselves be alarmed, that they end by paying no attention to any of them. Their nervous systems have so often cried out to them for help, as though with some serious malady, when it was simply going to start snowing or they were going to move house, that they have acquired the habit of paying no more heed to these warnings than a soldier who in the heat of battle perceives them so little that he is capable, although dying, of carrying on for some days still the life of a man in perfect health. One morning, bearing within me all my habitual ailments, from whose constant internal circulation I kept my mind turned as resolutely away as from the circulation of my blood, I came running blithely into the dining-room where my parents were already at table, and—having assured myself, as usual, that to feel cold may mean not that one ought to warm oneself but that, for instance, one has received a scolding, and not to feel hungry may mean that it is going to rain and not that one ought to fast—had taken my place between them when in the act of swallowing the first mouthful of a particularly tempting cutlet, a nausea and dizziness brought me to a halt, the feverish reaction of an illness that had already begun, the symptoms of which had been masked and retarded by the ice of my indifference, but which obstinately refused the nourishment that I was not in a fit state to absorb. Then, at the same moment, the thought that I would be prevented from going out if I was seen to be unwell gave me, as the instinct of self-preservation gives a wounded man, the strength to crawl to my own
room, where I found that I had a temperature of 104, and then to get ready to go to the Champs-Elysées. Through the languid and vulnerable shell which encased them, my eager thoughts were urging me towards, were clamouring for the soothing delight of a game of prisoner’s base with Gilberte, and an hour later, barely able to keep on my feet, but happy in being by her side, I had still the strength to enjoy it.

Françoise, on our return, declared that I had been “taken bad,” that I must have caught a “hot and cold,” while the doctor, who was called in at once, declared that he “preferred” the “severity,” the “virulence” of the rise in temperature which accompanied my congestion of the lungs, and would be no more than “a flash in the pan,” to other symptoms, more “insidious” and “masked.” For some time now I had been liable to fits of breathlessness, and our doctor, braving the disapproval of my grandmother, who saw me already dying a drunkard’s death, had recommended me to take, as well as the caffeine which had been prescribed to help me to breathe, beer, champagne or brandy when I felt an attack coming. These attacks would subside, he said, in the “euphoria” brought on by the alcohol. I was often obliged, so that my grandmother should allow it to be given to me, instead of disguising, almost to make a display of my state of suffocation. On the other hand, as soon as I felt it coming, never being quite certain what proportions it would assume, I would grow distressed at the thought of my grandmother’s anxiety, of which I was far more afraid than of my own sufferings. But at the same time my body, either because it was too weak to keep those sufferings secret, or because it feared lest, in their ignorance of
the imminent attack, people might demand of me some exertion which it would have found impossible or dangerous, gave me the need to warn my grandmother of my symptoms with a precision into which I put a sort of physiological punctiliousness. If I observed in myself a disturbing symptom which I had not previously discerned, my body was in distress so long as I had not communicated it to my grandmother. If she pretended to take no notice, it made me insist. Sometimes I went too far; and that beloved face, which was no longer able always to control its emotion as in the past, would betray an expression of pity, a painful contraction. Then my heart was wrung by the sight of her grief; as if my kisses had the power to expel that grief, as if my affection could give my grandmother as much joy as my recovery, I flung myself into her arms. And its scruples being at the same time calmed by the certainty that she was now aware of the discomfort that I felt, my body offered no opposition to my reassuring her. I protested that this discomfort was not really painful, that I was in no sense to be pitied, that she might be quite sure that I was now happy; my body had wished to secure exactly the amount of pity that it deserved, and, provided that someone knew that it had a pain in its right side, it could see no harm in my declaring that this pain was of no consequence and was not an obstacle to my happiness; for my body did not pride itself on its philosophy; that was outside its province. Almost every day during my convalescence I had some of these fits of suffocation. One evening, after my grandmother had left me comparatively well, she returned to my room very late and, seeing me struggling for breath, “Oh, my poor boy,” she exclaimed, her face quivering with sympa
thy, “you must be in dreadful pain.” She left me at once; I heard the street door open, and in a little while she came back with some brandy which she had gone out to buy since there was none in the house. Presently I began to feel better. My grandmother, who was rather flushed, seemed somehow embarrassed, and her eyes had a look of weariness and dejection.

“I shall leave you alone now, and let you take advantage of this improvement,” she said, rising suddenly to go. I detained her, however, for a kiss, and could feel on her cold cheek something moist, but did not know whether it was the dampness of the night air through which she had just passed. Next day, she did not come to my room until the evening, having had, she told me, to go out. I considered that this showed a surprising indifference to my well-being, and I had to restrain myself in order not to reproach her with it.

My suffocations having persisted long after any congestion remained that could account for them, my parents brought in Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in to treat cases of this sort should be learned. Confronted with symptoms which may be those of three or four different complaints, it is in the long run his flair, his instinctive judgment, that must decide with which, despite the more or less similar appearance of them all, he has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any superiority in the other departments of the intellect, and a person of the utmost vulgarity, who admires the worst pictures, the worst music, who is without the slightest intellectual curiosity, may perfectly well possess it. In my case, what was physically evident might well have been caused by nervous spasms, by incipient
tuberculosis, by asthma, by a toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, by chronic bronchitis, or by a complex state into which more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and the sort of “feeding-up” which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as asthma and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in turn, would be fatal to a tubercular patient. But Cottard’s hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious: “Purges, violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol.” My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be “built up,” that I was already very nervy, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would make me worse. I could see in Cottard’s eyes, as anxious as if he was afraid of missing a train, that he was wondering whether he had not succumbed to his natural gentleness. He was trying to think whether he had remembered to put on his mask of coldness, as one looks for a mirror to see whether one has forgotten to tie one’s tie. In his uncertainty, and in order to compensate just in case, he replied brutally: “I am not in the habit of repeating my prescriptions. Give me a pen. Now remember, milk! Later on, when we’ve got the breathlessness and the agrypnia under control, I’m prepared to let you take a little clear soup, and then a little broth, but always with milk;
au lait!
You’ll enjoy that, since Spain is all the rage just now;
olé
,
olé!
” (His pupils knew this joke well, for he made it at the hospital whenever he had to put a heart or liver case on a milk diet.) “After that, you’ll gradually return to your normal life. But whenever there’s any coughing or choking—purges, enemas, bed, milk!” He listened with icy calm, and without replying, to my mother’s final objections, and as he left us without having condescended to explain the reasons for this course of treatment, my parents concluded that it had no bearing on my case, and would weaken me to no purpose, and so they did not make me try it. Naturally they sought to conceal their disobedience from the Professor, and to make sure of it avoided all the houses in which they might have run across him. Then, as my health deteriorated, they decided to make me follow Cottard’s prescriptions to the letter; in three days my rattle and cough had ceased, I could breathe freely. Whereupon we realised that Cottard, while finding, as he told us later on, that I was distinctly asthmatic, and above all “batty,” had discerned that what was really the matter with me at the moment was toxaemia, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys he would clear my bronchial tubes and thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength. And we realised that this imbecile was a great physician.

At last I was able to get up. But there was talk of my no longer being allowed to go to the Champs-Elysées. The reason given was that the air there was bad; but I felt sure that this was only a pretext so that I should no longer be able to see Mile Swann, and I forced myself to repeat the name of Gilberte all the time, like the native tongue which peoples in captivity endeavour to preserve among themselves so as not to forget the land that they will never see again.

Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead, saying: “So little boys don’t tell Mamma their troubles
any more?” And Françoise used to come up to me every day and say: “What a face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself! You look like death!” It is true that, if I had simply had a cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal air. These lamentations pertained rather to her “class” than to the state of my health. I could not at the time distinguish whether this pessimism was due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided provisionally that it was social and professional.

One day, after the postman had called, my mother laid a letter upon my bed. I opened it carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature that would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had no relations outside the Champs-Elysées. But there, at the foot of the page, which was embossed with a silver seal representing a helmeted head above a scroll with the device
Per viam rectam
, beneath a letter written in a large and flowing hand in which almost every phrase appeared to be underlined, simply because the crosses of the “t”s ran not across but over them, and so drew a line beneath the corresponding letters of the word above, it was precisely Gilberte’s signature that I saw. But because I knew this to be impossible in a letter addressed to me, the sight of it unaccompanied by any belief in it gave me no pleasure. For a moment it merely gave an impression of unreality to everything around me. With dizzy speed the improbable signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw everything reel, as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct contradiction to it, but itself the real one, which, being suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that hesitation which sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have given to the awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next world. “My dear friend,” said the letter, “I hear that you have been very ill and have given up going to the Champs-Elysées. I hardly ever go there either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness. But my friends come to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma asks me to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you will come too as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more nice talks here as we did in the Champs-Elysées. Good-bye, my dear friend; I hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often. With all my kindest regards. G
ILBERTE
.”