- 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.
ben green
(Ben Green)
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