TIME BEGINS TO BE LOST 331nucleus' and an unfaithful husband, was Dr Pozzi at Mme
Aubernon's; his pince-nez and involuntary wink were those of
Proust's professor, Albert Vandal; but his name was taken from
Dr Proust's fellow-student Cotard and Dr Cottet at Evian. The
model for Dr du Boulbon was the favourite physician of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, Dr Le Reboulet; but a guest of Dr
Proust, the warty-faced Dr Laboulbene, contributed to his name.
Dr Dieulafoy, with his 'charmingly supple figure and face too
handsome in itself', who is sent for simply to certify the grand-
mother's last agony and, says the Narrator at the time of writing,
'is now no longer with us',! was a real person, Professor Georges
Dieulafoy (1839-1911). He was Princesse Mathilde's doctor and
guest, and Proust's friend Gabriel Astruc took him, no doubt
with some good reason, for an original of Cottard. The wife of
his brother Marcel, Mme Jane Dieulafoy, was a strange, mannish,
emancipated little woman, who wore trousers and smoked cigars,
but was much in demand by hostesses in her capacity as an eminent
archaeologist and the excavator of Darius's palace at Susa.^2 Once,
when she called at the Revue de Parir offices, the commissionaire
announced her to Ganderax: "there's a gentleman downstairs
who says he's a lady!"; and at a society dinner one evening, when
she insisted on joining the men in the smoking-room, General
de Gallilfet took her by the arm and said: "Come along, my dear
feller, let's go and have a p-s." Professor E., who automatically
quotes poetry before examining the Narrator's grandmother, is
Dr Edouard Brissaud, author of Hygiene for Asthmatics, 'our
dear medecin malgri lui, on whom one almost has to use physical
force to get him to talk medicine,' wrote Proust after consulting
him in 190).3 Another friend of the Proust family and guest of
Mme Aubernon was Dr Albert Robin, who told Proust: "I might
be able to get rid of your asthma, but I wouldn't advise it; in. your case.it acts as an outlet, and saves you from having other
1 II, 343
:II 'M. Nissim Bernard's face,' remarks the Narrator on the occasion of his
dinner with Bloch's family at Balbec, 'seemed to have been brought back
from Darius's palace and restored by Mme Dieulafoy' (I, 774).
3 Proust told Lucien Daudet in 1921 that there was 'something of
Brissaud's type of doctor, more a sceptic and a clever talker than a clinician,
in Du Boulhon'. But it was his habit not only to create a single character
from several originals, but to distribute elements of a single real person over
several characters.