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,