THE STUDENT IN SOCIETY 101never see that her jokes were always against herself. "The
Aubernon hag had no sense of the ridiculous," declared
Montesquiou, "because she was herself the very incarnation of
every possible form of it." She was absurd through her very
spontaneity, whereas Mme Verdurin was absurd through her
pretence of spontaneity. But as a hostess of half-comic, half-
terrifYing vanity and despotism, Mme Aubernon was the chief
original of Mme Verdurin. Moreover, it was among the band of
her 'faithful', as she herself called them, that Proust knew a
doctor like Cottard, a pedant like Brichot, and an invert like
Charlus; and he met them not only at her receptions in Paris, but
in a 'little train' on the way to her country-house.
The doctor was Dr Pozzi, whom we have already seen at Mme
Straus's and Princesse Mathilde's, and giving the schoolboy
Proust his first 'dinner in town'. He was, Leon Daudet says,
'talkative, hollow and reeking of hair-oil'. He resembled Cottard,
who was 'constantly unfaithful to his wife', in that his flirtations
with his lady patients were notorious: Mme Aubernon called him,
after Moliere's play, 'I'Amour Medecin'. He was vain of his good
looks, and opinions varied as to his skill as a surgeon: 'I wouldn't
have trusted him to cut my hair,' wrote Leon Daudet, 'especially
if there'd been a mirror in the room.' His wife, who was a relative
of Dr Cazalis (the original of Legrandin), resembled the kind,
dutiful, silly Mme Cottard: Mme Aubernon called her 'Pozzi's
mute'. He consoled her for his infidelities by saying: "I don't
deceive you, my dear, I supplement you." His chief love was a
lady in Belgium, and when he seemed overworked and despon-
dent Mme Pozzi would timidly say, "I think a trip to Belgium
would do you good." He was the most fashionable doctor of the
upper bourgeoisie, as was Dr Le Reboulet (who as Dr Du
Boulbon attended the Narrator's dying grandmother) of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain; though Pozzi too had friends and
patients in the Faubourg, who included Montesquiou him-
self.
The pedant was Victor Brochard, a professor at the Sorbonne
and author of a standard work on the Greek sceptics. He had been
the philosophie master at the Lycee Condorcet a few years before
Proust's arrival there, and had thought the 'aces' of that time,
such as Jacques Emile Blanche or Abel Hermant, unbeatable; but
when he saw Proust, F ernand Gregh and their contemporaries at