vanquished by a more ancient god, held its silver spindle motionless. Alas! other inferior creatures which man has trained to hunt the mysterious quarry which he himself is incapable of pursuing in the depths of his being, reported cruelly to us every day a certain quantity of albumin, not large, but constant enough for it also to appear to be related to some persistent malady which we could not detect. Bergotte had shaken that scrupulous instinct in me which made me subordinate my intellect when he spoke to me of Dr du Boulbon as of a physician who would not bore me, who would discover methods of treatment which, however strange they might appear, would adapt themselves to the singularity of my intelligence. But ideas transform themselves in us, overcome the resistance we put up to them at first, and feed upon rich intellectual reserves which were ready-made for them without our realising it. So, as happens whenever remarks we have heard made about someone we do not know have had the faculty of awakening in us the idea of great talent, of a sort of genius, in my inmost mind I now gave Dr du Boulbon the benefit of that unlimited confidence which is inspired in us by the man who, with an eye more penetrating than other men’s, perceives the truth. I knew indeed that he was more of a specialist in nervous diseases, the man to whom Charcot before his death had predicted that he would reign supreme in neurology and psychiatry. “Ah, I don’t know about that. It’s quite possible,” put in Françoise, who was in the room and who was hearing Charcot’s name, as indeed du Boulbon’s, for the first time. But this in no way prevented her from saying “It’s possible.” Her “possibles,” her “perhapses,” her “I don’t knows” were peculiarly irritating at such moments. One wanted to say to her: “Naturally you didn’t know, since you haven’t the faintest idea what we are talking about. How can you even say whether it’s possible or not, since you know nothing about it? Anyhow, you can’t say now that you don’t know what Charcot said to du Boulbon. You do know because we’ve just told you, and your ‘perhapses’ and ‘possibles’ are out of place, because it’s a fact.”
In spite of this more special competence in cerebral and nervous matters, as I knew that du Boulbon was a great physician, a superior man with a profound and inventive intellect, I begged my mother to send for him, and the hope that, by a clear perception of the malady, he might perhaps cure it, finally prevailed over the fear that we had that by calling in a consultant we would alarm my grandmother. What decided my mother was the fact that, unwittingly encouraged by Cottard, my grandmother no longer went out of doors, and scarcely rose from her bed. In vain might she answer us in the words of Mme de Sévigné’s letter on Mme de La Fayette: “Everyone said she was mad not to wish to go out. I said to these persons so precipitate in their judgment: ‘Mme de La Fayette is not mad!’ and I stuck to that. It has taken her death to prove that she was quite right not to go out.” Du Boulbon when he came decided against, if not Mme de Sévigné, whom we did not quote to him, at any rate my grandmother. Instead of sounding her chest, he gazed at her with his wonderful eyes, in which there was perhaps the illusion that he was making a profound scrutiny of his patient, or the desire to give her that illusion, which seemed spontaneous but must have become mechanical, or not to let her see that he was thinking of something quite different, or to establish his authority over her, and began to talk about Bergotte.
“Ah yes, indeed, Madame, he’s splendid. How right you are to admire him! But which of his books do you prefer? Oh, really? Why, yes, perhaps that is the best after all. In any case it is the best composed of his novels. Claire is quite charming in it. Which of his male characters appeals to you most?”
I supposed at first that he was making her talk about literature because he himself found medicine boring, perhaps also to display his breadth of mind and even, with a more therapeutic aim, to restore