In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [16]
house years ago my brother and I became so fond of him under the guise of the charming infant known as Basin, which is indeed the Duke’s first name. Thereupon Doctor Cottard, with that keen intelligence which shows him to be a man of real distinction, harks back to the story of the pearls and informs us that catastrophes of this kind can produce changes in people’s brains which are just like those that may be observed in inanimate matter, and, discoursing in a philosophical vein well beyond the powers of most doctors, quotes as an example Mme Verdurin’s own valet, who from the terrible shock of this fire in which he very nearly lost his life became a changed man, with a handwriting so altered that when his master and mistress, then in Normandy, first received a letter from him with the news of the fire, they thought that someone was playing a practical joke upon them. And not only an altered handwriting, according to Cottard, who maintains that this man, hitherto always sober, became such an abominable sot that Mme Verdurin was obliged to get rid of him. And the Doctor’s stimulating dissertation passes, upon a gracious sign from the mistress of the house, from the dining-room to the Venetian smoking-room, where he tells us that he has witnessed cases of what can only be called dual personality, citing as an instance one of his patients, whom he is so kind as to offer to bring to my house, whose temples he only has to touch, so he says, to awaken him to a second life, a life during which he remembers nothing of his first life and so different that, while he behaves most respectably in the first, he has more than once been arrested for thefts committed in the second, in which he is nothing more nor less than an abominable scoundrel. Whereupon Mme Verdurin acutely observes that medical science could provide the theatre with truer themes than those now in favour, themes in which the comicality of the plot would be based upon misunderstandings of a pathological kind, and this, by a natural transition, leads Mme Cottard to say that a very similar subject has been employed by a story-teller who is her children’s favourite at bedtime, the Scotsman Stevenson, a name which brings from Swann the peremptory statement: ‘But he is a really great writer, Stevenson, I assure you, M. de Goncourt, a very great writer, equal to the greatest.’ Next, after I have admired the ceiling of the room where we are smoking, with its escutcheoned coffers from the old Barberini palace, when I intimate my regret at the progressive blackening of a certain stone basin by the ash of our ‘Havanas’ and Swann remarks that similar stains on books from the library of Napoleon which are now, despite his anti-Bonapartist opinions, in the possession of the Duc de Guermantes, bear witness to the fact that the Emperor chewed tobacco, Cottard, who evinces a truly penetrating curiosity in all things, declares that the stains do not come from that at all—‘No, no, no, not at all,’ he insists with authority—but from the habit the Emperor had of always, even on the field of battle, clutching in his hand the liquorice tablets which he took to relieve the pain in his liver. ‘For he had a disease of the liver and that is what he died of,’ concludes the Doctor.”
There I stopped, for I was leaving the next morning; and besides it was the hour at which I was habitually summoned by that other master in whose service we spend, every day, a part of our time. The task which he assigns to us we accomplish with our eyes closed. Every morning he hands us back to the master who shares us with him, knowing that, unless he did so, we should be remiss in his own service. Curious, when our intelligence reopens its eyes, to know what we can have done under this master who first makes his slaves lie down and then puts them to work at full speed, the most artful among us try, the moment their task is finished, to take a covert glance. But sleep is racing against them to obliterate the traces of what they would like to see. And after all these centuries we still know very little about the matter.