it’s a drug to make one sleep.” “You’re not answering my question,” replied the Professor, who, thrice weekly, at the Faculty, sat on the board of examiners. “I’m not asking you whether it makes you sleep or not, but what it is. Can you tell me what percentage it contains of amyl and ethyl?” “No,” replied M. de Cambremer, abashed. “I prefer a good glass of old brandy or even 345 Port.” “Which are ten times as toxic,” the Professor interrupted. “As for trional,” M. de Cambremer ventured, “my wife goes in for all that sort of thing, you’d better talk to her about it.” “She probably knows as much about it as you do. In any case, if your wife takes trional to make her sleep, you can see that mine has no need of it. Come along, Léontine, wake up, you’ll get stiff. Did you ever see me fall asleep after dinner? What will you be like when you’re sixty, if you fall asleep now like an old woman? You’ll get fat, you’re arresting your circulation. She doesn’t even hear what I’m saying.” “They’re bad for one’s health, these little naps after dinner, aren’t they, Doctor?” said M. de Cambremer, seeking to rehabilitate himself with Cottard. “After a heavy meal one ought to take exercise.” “Stuff and nonsense!” replied the Doctor. “Identical quantities of food have been taken from the stomach of a dog that has lain quiet and from the stomach of a dog that has been running about, and it’s in the former that digestion has been found to be more advanced.” “Then it’s sleep that interrupts the digestion.” “That depends whether you mean oesophagic digestion, stomachic digestion or intestinal digestion. It’s pointless giving you explanations which you wouldn’t understand since you’ve never studied medicine. Now then, Léontine, quick march, it’s time we were going.” This was not true, for the Doctor was merely going to continue his game, but he hoped thus to cut short in a more drastic fashion the slumbers of the deaf mute to whom he had been addressing without a word of response the most learned exhortations. Either because a determination to remain awake survived in Mme Cottard, even in her sleep, or because the armchair offered no support to her head, it was jerked mechanically from left to right and up and down in the empty air, like a lifeless object, and Mme Cottard, with her nodding poll, appeared now to be listening to music, now to be in her death-throes. Where her husband’s increasingly vehement admonitions failed of their effect, her sense of her own stupidity proved successful: “My bath is nice and hot,” she murmured. “But the feathers on the dictionary . . .” she exclaimed, sitting up. “Oh, good gracious, what a fool I am! Whatever have I been saying? I was thinking about my hat, and I’m sure I said something silly. In another minute I would have dozed off. It’s that wretched fire.” Everybody laughed, for there was no fire in the room.
“You’re making fun of me,” said Mme Cottard, herself laughing, and raising her hand to her forehead with the light touch of a hypnotist and the deftness of a woman putting her hair straight, to erase the last traces of sleep, “I must offer my humble apologies to dear Mme Verdurin and get the truth from her.” But her smile at once grew mournful, for the Professor, who knew that his wife sought to please him and trembled lest she fail to do so, had shouted at her: “Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re as red as if you had an eruption of acne. You look just like an old peasant.”
“You know, he’s charming,” said Mme Verdurin, “he has such a delightfully sardonic good nature. And then, he snatched my husband from the jaws of death when the whole medical profession had given him up. He spent three nights by his bedside, without ever lying down. And so for me, you know,” she went on in a grave and almost menacing tone, raising her hand to the twin spheres, shrouded in white tresses, of her musical temples, and as though we had threatened to assault the Doctor, “Cottard is sacred! He could ask me for anything in the world! As it is, I don’t call him Doctor Cottard, I call him Doctor God! And even in saying