330 MARCEL PROUST
though not without talent, on historical subjects, and produced
newspaper articles on foreign affairs under the pseudonym
'Testis'.l Armand Nisard, ambassador at the Vatican from 1898
to 1904, had at least two features ofM. de Norpois: he was Marie
de Benardaky's uncle by marriage, so that Proust might well
have been on the point of kissing his hand in gratitude for his
promise to pu t in a word for him with Marie's parents2; and he
was felt to have shown lack of zeal in supporting Dr Proust's
candidature for the Academy of Moral Sciences.^3
Dr Proust's dining-room was also an ideally situated strategic
point for observing the natural history of doctors, and in parti-
cular the originals of Cottard, Du Boullion, Dieulafoy and
Professor E. Dr Eugene-Louis Doyen (1859-1916), a surgeon of
sensationally original technique, with greying blond hair,
astonished blue eyes and an athletic figure, was a model for many
qualities of Cottard: his icy brutality, naivete, inspired tactless-
ness, fury when contradicted by a patient, and total, incurable
ignorance in cultural and social matters. "With all her gifts," he
flabbergasted Proust by announcing, "Mme Greffulhe hasn't
managed to make her salon anything like as brilliant as Mme de
Caillavet's!" Dr Doyen regarded himself as Potain's superior-
"Potain's an old fool," he would say-an opinion shared by Mme
Verdurin.^4 The dates of his life fit those of Dr Cottard, who is
young in the 1880s and dies during the war. Professor Guyon,
the urologist and teacher of Robert Proust, was a tall, thin man
with white whiskers, from whose inexhaustible puns and cliches
Proust collected a store of hints for Cottard; and Auguste Broca
was another surgeon who, like Cottard, kept his students in fits
of laughter with puns, chestnuts and oaths. As we have seen,
Cottard, as a foundation-member of Mme Verdurin's 'little
1 M. de Norpois at Venice, discussing with Prince Foggi the question ora
succeSsor to the retiring Italian prime minister, remarks: "And has no one
pronounced the name of M. Giolitti?"-'words which supplied the chancel-
leries of Europe with food for conversation throughout the next twenty
years, and when at last forgotten were exhumed by persons signing them-
selves "One who Knows", "Testis", or "Machiavelli" I (III, 635). Proust is
here at his usual trick of juxtaposing one of his characters with the name of
an original of the character; and the passage is immediately followed (III,
637) by a satirical account of the emotions on this occasion of yet another
model for M. de Norpois, M. Barrere himself.
2 Cf. I, 477 • Cf. II, 225-6 • I, .88