By this time, Mme. Cottard was sound asleep. “Now then, Léontine, you’re snoring,” the professor called to her. “I am listening to Mme. Swann, my dear,” Mme. Cottard replied faintly, and dropped back into her lethargy. “It’s perfect nonsense,” exclaimed Cottard, “she’ll be telling us presently that she wasn’t asleep. She’s like the patients who come to consult us and insist that they never sleep at all.” “They imagine it, perhaps,” said M. de Cambremer with a laugh. But the doctor enjoyed contradicting no less than teasing, and would on no account allow a layman to talk medicine to him. “People do not imagine that they never sleep,” he promulgated in a dogmatic tone. “Ah!” replied the Marquis with a respectful bow, such as Cottard at one time would have made. “It is easy to see,” Cottard went on, “that you have never administered, as I have, as much as two grains of trional without succeeding in provoking somnolescence.” “Quite so, quite so,” replied the Marquis, laughing with a superior air, “I have never taken trional, or any of those drugs which soon cease to have any effect but ruin your stomach. When a man has been out shooting all night, like me, in the forest of Chantepie, I can assure you he doesn’t need any trional to make him sleep.” “It is only fools who say that,” replied the Professor. “Trional frequently has a remarkable effect on the nervous tone. You mention trional, have you any idea what it is?” “Well … I’ve heard people say that it is a drug to make one sleep.” “You are not answering my question,” replied the Professor, who, thrice weekly, at the Faculty, sat on the board of examiners. “I don’t ask 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 with embarrassment. “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 just as much about it as yourself. 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’re getting ankylosed, 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 go and get fat, you’re arresting the circulation. She doesn’t even hear what I’m saying.” “They’re bad for one’s health, these little naps after dinner, ain’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. “We have taken identical quantities of food from the stomach of a dog that has lain quiet and from the stomach of a dog that has been running about and it is in the former that digestion is more advanced.” “Then it is sleep that stops digestion.” “That depends upon whether you mean oesophagic digestion, stomachic digestion, intestinal digestion; it is useless to give you explanations which you would not understand since you have never studied medicine. Now then, Léontine, quick march, it is time we were going.” This was not true, for the doctor was going merely 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. Whether a determination to remain awake survived in Mme. Cottard, even in the state of 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 the last throes of death. 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 in the dictionary …” she exclaimed as she sat bolt upright. “Oh! Good lord, what a fool I am. Whatever have I been saying, I was thinking about my hat, I’m sure I said something silly, in another minute I should have been asleep, it’s that wretched fire.” Everybody began to laugh, for there was no fire in the room.
“You are making fun of me,” said Mme. Cottard, herself laughing, and raising her hand to her brow to wipe away, with the light touch of a hypnotist and the sureness of a woman putting her hair straight, the last traces of sleep, “I must offer my humble apologies to dear Mme. Verdurin and ask her to tell me the truth.” But her smile at once grew sorrowful, for the Professor who knew that his wife sought to please him and trembled lest she should fail, had shouted at her: “Look at yourself in the glass, you are as red as if you had an eruption of acne, you look just like an old peasant.” “You know, he is charming,” said Mme. Verdurin, “he has such a delightfully sarcastic
