31.^8 MARCEL PROUST
because it wouldn't be a monastery if everybody came!' But
Proust was destined, though not yet, for a different and even
stranger form of solitude. At the end of September, however, on
his way home, he visited a rather similar establishment, the
fifteenth-century hospital at Beaune, with its nun nurses, all
chosen from rich families, wearing their white summer habits
and looking like his vision of Mme de N oailles as abbess. He
thought of having himself admitted as an emergency case: had
not Viollet Ie Due said, 'the hospital at Beaune is so beautiful that
it makes the tourist long to fall ill there'?; and yet, he wrote to
Marie Nordlinger, 'ifViollet Ie Due had been in my condition he
wouldn't have spoken so lightly'. He dragged himself to Paris
and was ill for a month, paying for each evening out with several
evenings in bed.
The energetic and distinguished life of Dr Proust was now near
its close. It was thirry-three years since the morning in August
1870, a few days before the Battle of Sedan and his marriage to
Jeanne Weil, when he received from the Empress Eugenie the
cross of chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He had risen through
the rank of officer to that of commander; and many years later,
when Proust himself received the cross, he remembered his awe
as a boy when, on gala evenings, he watched his father putting
on the red cravat of his decoration. In 1879 Dr Proust was
elected to the seat in the Academy of Medicine left vacant by the
death of his master Ambroise Tardieu; in 1884 he succeeded to
the post of F auvel, inventor of the cordon sanitaire, as Inspector-
General of Sanitary Services; and in 1885 he became Professor
of Hygiene in the Faculty of Medicine. Throughout his life he
continued his intense activity as a teacher, a writer on medicine,!
and a practising physician. Marcel was accustomed to invite his
friends to consult his father on their ailments: 'would you like
Papa to come and see you?' he asked Antoine Bibesco OJ:) the
occasion of an indisposition in this same summer of 1903.
Anatole France, however (perhaps when afflicted with the cyst
1 His bibliography includes thirty-four items, covering a wide range of
interests. Besides international hygiene he wrote on tuberculosis, rabies,
deficiency diseases, paralysis, aphasia, various nervous and brain maladies,
and occupational ailments, including (as his son must have noticed with a
wry smile) 'saturnism', not in the sense familiar to Marcel and the Bibescos
but meaning lead-poisoning.