334 MARCEL PROUST
speech at the Illiers prize-giving on 27 July. "The emotion I feel
on coming to your school sixty years after is something you will
perhaps fail to understand," he said, "not because at fifteen one
is less intelligent or comprehending than at my age; on the
contrary I think one is able to understand a great deal more in
boyhood. But there is one thing which is a closed book to the
young, or which they can only guess at by a kind of presentiment,
and that is the poetry and melancholy of memory." Perhaps
father and son were not so different as they believed. Each dis-
appointed his father, and achieved fame long after his father's
death; each gave his life for a great aim, and died in the hour of
its accomplishment.
On Sunday, 22 November, Dr Proust and Marcel had their
last quarrel. 'We had an argument about politics,' Proust' told
Mme de Noailles a week later, 'and I said things I ought not to
have said.l I feel as though I'd been hard on someone who could
no longer defend himself. I don't know what I wouldn't give to
have been more gentle and affectionate that evening. Papa's
character was so much nobler than mine. I never stop complain-
ing; but when Papa was ill his only thought was to keep us from
knowing it.' And indeed, Dr Proust's last recorded words,
probably spoken to Robert Proust a few weeks before, were
these: "I've had a happy life. My only wish now is to leave it
quietly and without pain."
On Monday, 23 November, Dr Proust took part, with his
accustomed energy and lucidity, in a meeting of the Permanent
Commission on Tuberculosis. In the afternoon he saw his
patients and gave his usual consultations. Next day he called on
Robert Proust at his new home, 136 Boulevard Saint-Germain,
on his way to preside over an examination at the Faculty of
Medicine; and Robert, alarmed at his father's look of harassed
exhaustion, insisted on accompanying him to the nearby Ecole
de Medecine. Robert, who no doubt would have preferred to be
with his pregnant wife, went to his laboratory; but a few minutes
later he was summoned by an anxious attendant to the cloak-
room, where his father was locked in a water-closet and could1 As father and son were in agreement on the injustice of the Combes
Laws, and Marcel had moved well to the right of his position during the
Affair, it is difficult to see what they can have found to argue about. Perhaps
Dr Proust said something like: "Now you see what Dreyfusism leads to!"