In Search of Lost Time

was full of trumps. “Here comes the lady of diamonds,” said the doctor. “That’s a trump, you know? My trick. But there isn’t a Sorbonne any longer,” said the doctor to M. de Cambremer; “there’s only the University of Paris.” M. de Cambremer confessed his inability to understand why the doctor made this remark to him. “I thought you were talking about the Sorbonne,” replied the doctor. “I heard you say: tu nous la sors bonne,” he added, with a wink, to show that this was meant for a pun. “Just wait a moment,” he said, pointing to his adversary, “I have a Trafalgar in store for him.” And the prospect must have been excellent for the doctor, for in his joy his shoulders began to shake rapturously with laughter, which in his family, in the “breed” of the Cottards, was an almost zoological sign of satisfaction. In the previous generation the gesture of rubbing the hands together as though one were soaping them used to accompany this movement. Cottard himself had originally employed both forms simultaneously, but one fine day, nobody ever knew by whose intervention, wifely, professorial perhaps, the rubbing of the hands had disappeared. The doctor even at dominoes, when he got his adversary on the run, and made him take the double six, which was to him the keenest of pleasures, contented himself with shaking his shoulders. And when⁠—which was as seldom as possible⁠—he went down to his native village for a few days, and met his first cousin, who was still at the hand-rubbing stage, he would say to Mme. Cottard on his return: “I thought poor René very common.” “Have you the little dee-ar?” he said, turning to Morel. “No? Then I play this old David.” “Then you have five, you have won!” “That’s a great victory, Doctor,” said the Marquis. “A Pyrrhic victory,” said Cottard, turning to face the Marquis and looking at him over his glasses to judge the effect of his remark. “If there is still time,” he said to Morel, “I give you your revenge. It is my deal. Ah! no, here come the carriages, it will have to be Friday, and I shall show you a trick you don’t see every day.” M. and Mme. Verdurin accompanied us to the door. The Mistress was especially coaxing with Saniette so as to make certain of his returning next time. “But you don’t look to me as if you were properly wrapped up, my boy,” said M. Verdurin, whose age allowed him to address me in this paternal tone. “One would say the weather had changed.” These words filled me with joy, as though the profoundly hidden life, the uprising of different combinations which they implied in nature, hinted at other changes, these occurring in my own life, and created fresh possibilities in it. Merely by opening the door upon the park, before leaving, one felt that a different “weather” had, at that moment, taken possession of the scene; cooling breezes, one of the joys of summer, were rising in the fir plantation (where long ago Mme. de Cambremer had dreamed of Chopin) and almost imperceptibly, in caressing coils, capricious eddies, were beginning their gentle nocturnes. I declined the rug which, on subsequent evenings, I was to accept when Albertine was with me, more to preserve the secrecy of my pleasure than to avoid the risk of cold. A vain search was made for the Norwegian philosopher. Had he been seized by a colic? Had he been afraid of missing the train? Had an aeroplane come to fetch him? Had he been carried aloft in an Assumption? In any case he had vanished without anyone’s noticing his departure, like a god. “You are unwise,” M. de Cambremer said to me, “it’s as cold as charity.” “Why charity?” the doctor inquired. “Beware of choking,” the Marquis went on. “My sister never goes out at night. However, she is in a pretty bad state at present. In any case you oughtn’t to stand about bareheaded, put your tile on at once.” “They are not frigorific chokings,” said Cottard sententiously. “Oh, indeed!” M. de Cambremer bowed. “Of course, if that’s your opinion⁠ ⁠…” “Opinions of the press!” said the doctor, smiling round his glasses. M. de Cambremer laughed, but, feeling certain that he was in the right, insisted: “All the same,” he said, “whenever my sister goes out after dark, she has an attack.” “It’s no use quibbling,” replied the doctor, regardless of his want of manners. “However, I don’t practise medicine by the seaside, unless I am called in for a consultation. I am here on holiday.” He was perhaps even more on holiday than he would have liked. M. de Cambremer having said to him as they got into the carriage together: “We are fortunate in having quite close to us (not on your side of the bay, on the opposite side, but it is quite narrow at that point) another medical celebrity, Doctor du Boulbon,” Cottard, who, as a rule, from “deontology,” abstained from criticising his colleagues, could not help exclaiming, as he had exclaimed to me on the fatal day when we had visited the little casino: “But he is not a doctor. He practises a literary medicine, it is all fantastic therapeutics, charlatanism. All the same, we are on quite good terms. I should take the boat and go over and pay him a visit, if I weren’t leaving.” But, from the air which Cottard assumed in speaking of du Boulbon to M. de Cambremer, I felt that the boat which he would gladly have taken to call upon him would have greatly resembled that vessel which, in order to go and ruin the waters discovered by another literary doctor, Virgil (who took all their patients from them as well), the doctors of Salerno had chartered, but which sank with them on the voyage. “Goodbye, my dear Saniette, don’t forget to come tomorrow, you know how my husband enjoys seeing you. He enjoys your wit, your intellect;