Marcel Proust: A Biography

(Ben Green) #1

  1. MARCEL PROUST
    diseases." He was renowned for the mysterious eccentricity of
    his prescriptions: for example, to an old lady in whom he wished
    to inculcate a certain complicated exercise of muscles and lungs,
    he declared: "you must take off all your clothes, and then hop
    round a table six feet in circumference, eating an artichoke one
    leaf at a time" -'I've exaggerated this only vety slightly,' remarks
    Leon Daudet, who tells the story. Dr Robin was infatuated with
    Liane de Pougy, who was jealous of his family and forbade him
    to use the words 'my wife', 'my son'. "What must I say, then?"
    "Say 'the mouster', and 'the little monster'!" Butthe form in
    which Proust knew this story was very different, whether because
    it had been misreported to him, or because it had undergone a
    significant transformation in his uuconscious: he mistakenly
    believed that Dr Robin called his child 'the little monster' not in
    jest but iu sadistic delight, 'because he couldn't obtain full sexual
    pleasure iu any other way'; and he told Louis de Robert that he
    had used Dr Robin's example, among others, for the scene at
    Montjouvain in which Mile Vinteuil induces her friend to call her
    dead father 'that old monkey'.l But the mingled admiration and
    contempt with which Proust treats the medical profession in A
    la Recherche is doubtless in part a reflection of his own feelings
    towards his father.
    Time had played its old, merciless trick on Dr Proust. He was
    no longer the handsome, black-bearded man of forty, running in
    the early mornings of the 1870S along the Rue La Fontaine to
    catch the Auteuil-Madeleine omnibus, or meeting the young
    Mme Proust with the infant Marcel and Robert in Louis Weil's
    carriage outside the Hotel-Dieu at the day's end; no longer even
    the keeu-eyed, pursed-lipped, Holbeinesque figure of Lecomte
    du Nouy's portrait in 1885. A photograph of the Doctor outside
    St Mark's at Venice, with the pigeons of the Piazza feeding at
    his feet, perching in his hands, alighting on his shoulder, or
    another in which he stands, morning-paper in hand, with the
    fiercely-moustached Robert on the balcony of 45 Rue de
    Courcelles, show a fading old gentleman with a short round
    grey beard, looking rather like Edward the Seventh. He had
    grown corpulent, like his wife; his voice was deep, but slightly
    nasal; his habit of wearing his pince-nez far down his nose forced
    him to tilt his head far back; his face wore a perspicacious,
    1 I, 162.

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