TIME BEGINS TO BE LOST 329for which he was operated on by Dr Pozzi in September 1899),
was wary: "My dear young friend," he said, "I should never dare
to consult your father; I'm not important enough for him; the
only patients he takes on nowadays are river-basins!" But the
sublime task to which Dr Proust had devoted his life was the
exclusion of cholera from the frontiers of Europe. He was the
leading spirit in a series of international conferences for the im-
position, particularly at Suez, of the cordon sanitaire; and it must
sadly be confessed that his chief opponent, partly for reasons of
commercial convenience, partly from well-founded suspicion of
French ambitions in Egypt, was the formidable power of
England. At the Rome Sanitary Conference in 1885, thanks to
England, little was accomplished; but at Venice in 1892 and
Dresden in 1893 Dr Proust secured unanimous agreement of the
powers, with the sole exception of England; and in this very year
1903 his life-work was crowned by the adhesion of that refractory
nation and the formation of the International Office of Public
Hygiene in Paris. "In those days," Casimir-Perier, then Minister
of Foreign Affairs, had said in 1894, "the politicians had to
practice a little medicine, and the doctors had to be politicians";
and everyone knew that he was alluding to Dr Proust and M.
Barrere. \Vestern civilisation owes a debt to Proust's father not
only for producing one of its greatest novelists, but for the major
part he played in the banishment of cholera from Europe.
His political colleague during those stirring years was Camille
Barrere, afterwards ambassador at the Quirinal from 1897 to
1925, with his long face, aggressive oblong beard, and keen
Norpois eyes. When A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs was
published in 1919 M. Barrere suspected, with extreme indignation,
that M. de N orpois was meant for himself; 'simply because he
used to dine with us every week when I was a child,' said Proust
mendaciously, 'whereas M. de Norpois is a representative of a. diplomatic type which is the exact opposite ofM. Barrere, though
no less utterly detestable!' But Proust also met other originals of
M. de N orpois through his father. Gabriel Hanotaux, Foreign
Minister from 1894 to 1898, had shown in Proust's student days
M. de Norpois's infuriating confidence in the practicability of
combining a diplomatic with a literary career. M. Hanotaux had
every reason to think so; for he became a member of the Academie
F ran~aise on 2 April 1897, wrote voluminously and boringly,