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By Root 1636 0

however, there was; everything, whether headache or colic, heart-disease or diabetes, was a disease of the nose that had been wrongly diagnosed. To each of us he said: “I should like to have another look at that little nozzle. Don’t put it off too long. I’ll soon clear it for you with a hot needle.” Of course we paid no attention whatsoever. And yet we asked ourselves: “Clear it of what?” In a word, every one of our noses was infected; his mistake lay only in his use of the present tense. For by the following day his examination and provisional treatment had taken effect. Each of us had his or her catarrh. And when in the street he ran into my father doubled up with a cough, he smiled to think that an ignorant layman might suppose the attack to be due to his intervention. He had examined us at a moment when we were already ill.

My grandmother’s illness gave occasion to various people to manifest an excess or deficiency of sympathy which surprised us quite as much as the sort of chance which led one or another of them to reveal to us connecting links of circumstances, or even of friendships, which we had never suspected. And the signs of interest shown by the people who called incessantly at the house to inquire revealed to us the gravity of an illness which, until then, we had not sufficiently detached from the countless painful impressions that we received by my grandmother’s sickbed. Informed by telegram, her sisters declined to leave Combray. They had discovered a musician there who gave them excellent chamber recitals, in listening to which they felt they could enjoy better than by the invalid’s bedside a contemplative melancholy, a sorrowful exaltation, the form of which was, to say the least of it, unusual. Mme Sazerat wrote to Mamma, but in the tone of a person whom the sudden breaking off of an engagement (the cause of the rupture being Dreyfusism) has separated from one for ever. Bergotte, on the other hand, came every day and spent several hours with me.

He had always enjoyed going regularly for some time to the same house where he had no need to stand on ceremony. But formerly it had been in order that he might talk without being interrupted; now it was so that he might sit for as long as he chose in silence, without being expected to talk. For he was very ill, some people said with albuminuria, like my grandmother, while according to others he had a tumour. He grew steadily weaker; it was with difficulty that he climbed our staircase, with greater difficulty still that he went down it. Even though he held on to the banisters he often stumbled, and he would, I believe, have stayed at home had he not been afraid of losing altogether the habit and the capacity of going out, he, the “man with the goatee” whom I remembered as being so alert not very long since. He was now quite blind, and often he even had trouble with his speech.

But at the same time, by a directly opposite process, the corpus of his work, known only to a few literary people at the period when Mme Swann used to patronise their timid efforts to disseminate it, now grown in stature and strength in the eyes of all, had acquired an extraordinary power of expansion among the general public. No doubt it often happens that only after his death does a writer become famous. But it was while he was still alive, and during his own slow progress towards approaching death, that this writer was able to watch the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name stops short at his gravestone. In the deafness of eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult. He still moved about, though with difficulty, while his books, cavorting like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youthfulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after day to his very bedside a crowd of fresh admirers.

The visits which he now began to pay us came for me several years too late, for