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By Root 1656 0

the superior smile of a Parisian who, in conversation with a peasant, might hope to surprise him by using a word of the local dialect, that Dr du Boulbon said to my grandmother: “Probably a windy night will help to put you to sleep when the strongest soporifics would have no effect.” “On the contrary, the wind always keeps me wide awake.” But doctors are touchy people. “Ach!” muttered du Boulbon with a frown, as if someone had trodden on his toe, or as if my grandmother’s sleeplessness on stormy nights were a personal insult to himself. He had not, however, an undue opinion of himself, and since, in his character as a “superior” person, he felt himself bound not to put any faith in medicine, he quickly recovered his philosophic serenity.

My mother, in her passionate longing for reassurance from Bergotte’s friend, added in support of his verdict that a first cousin of my grandmother’s, who suffered from a nervous complaint, had remained for seven years shut up in her bedroom at Combray, without getting up more than once or twice a week.

“You see, Madame, I didn’t know that, and yet I could have told you.”

“But, Doctor, I’m not in the least like her; on the contrary, my doctor complains that he cannot get me to stay in bed,” said my grandmother, either because she was a little irritated by the doctor’s theories, or because she was anxious to submit to him all the objections that might be made to them, in the hope that he would refute these and that, once he had gone, she would no longer have any doubts as to the accuracy of his encouraging diagnosis.

“Why, naturally, Madame, one cannot have—if you’ll forgive the expression—every form of mental derangement. You have others, but not that particular one. Yesterday I visited a home for neurasthenics. In the garden, I saw a man standing on a bench, motionless as a fakir, his neck bent in a position which must have been highly uncomfortable. On my asking him what he was doing there, he replied without turning his head or moving a muscle: ‘You see, Doctor, I am extremely rheumatic and catch cold very easily. I have just been taking a lot of exercise, and while I was foolishly getting too hot, my neck was touching my flannels. If I move it away from my flannels now before letting myself cool down, I’m sure to get a stiff neck and possibly bronchitis.’ Which he would, in fact, have done. ‘You’re a real neurotic, that’s what you are,’ I told him. And do you know what argument he advanced to prove that I was mistaken? It was this: that while all the other patients in the establishment had a mania for testing their weight, so much so that the weighing machine had to be padlocked so that they shouldn’t spend the whole day on it, he had to be lifted on to it bodily, so little did he care to be weighed. He prided himself on not sharing the mania of the others, oblivious of the fact that he had one of his own, and that it was this that saved him from another. You must not be offended by the comparison, Madame, for that man who dared not turn his neck for fear of catching a chill is the greatest poet of our day. That poor lunatic is the most lofty intellect that I know. Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced, Madame,” he added with a smile at my grandmother, “for confess now, when I came, you were not feeling very confident. You thought you were ill, dangerously ill, perhaps. Heaven only knows what disease you thought you had detected the symptoms of in yourself. And you were