In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes way by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Unread, 110 best books: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780099362418
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1996-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

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made my grandmother swallow this drug and then replaced the thermometer

in her mouth. Like an implacable warder to whom one presents a permitsigned by a higher authority whose protecting influence one has soughtJand who, finding it to be in order, replies: "Very well; I have nothing tosay; if it's like that you may pass," this time the watcher in the tower didnot move. But sullenly she seemed to be saying: "What use will that beto you? Since you are friends with quinine, she may give me the order notto go up, once, ten times, twenty times. And then she will grow tired oftelling me, I know her; get along with you. This won't last for ever. Andthen you'll be a lot better off." Thereupon my grandmother felt the pres-

ence within her of a creature which knew the human body better thanherself, the presence of a contemporary of the races that have vanished

from the earth, the presence of earth's first inhabitant-long anterior tothe creation of thinking man-she felt that aeonial ally who was soundingher, a little roughly even, in the head, the heart, the elbow; he found outthe weak places, organised everything for the prehistoric combat whichbegan at once to be fought. In a moment a trampled Python, the fever,was vanquished by the potent chemical substance to which my grand-mother, across the series of kingdoms, reaching out beyond all animal andvegetable life, would fain have been able to give thanks. And she remainedmoved by this glimpse which she had caught, through the mists of so manycenturies, of a climate anterior to the creation even of plants. Meanwhilethe thermometer, like a Weird Sister momentarily vanquished by somemore ancient god, held motionless her silver spindle. Alas! other inferiorcreatures which man has trained to the chase of the mysterious quarrywhich he cannot pursue within the pathless forest of himself, reportedcruelly to us every day a certain quantity of albumen, not large, but con-stant enough for it also to appear to bear relation to some persistent maladywhich we could not detect. Bergotte had shocked that scrupulous instinctin me which made me subordinate my intellect when he spoke to me ofDr. du Boulbon as of a physician who would not bore me, who would dis-cover methods of treatment which, however strange they might appear,would adapt themselves to the singularity of my mind. But ideas transformthemselves in us, they overcome the resistance with which we at first meetthem, and feed upon rich intellectual reserves which we did not know to.t have been prepared for them. So, as happens whenever anything we haveheard 'said about some one whom ~e do not know has had the faculty of. awakening in us the idea of great talent, of a sort of genius, in my inmost! mind I gave Dr. du Boulbon the benefit of that unlimited confidence whichhe inspires in us who with an eye more penetrating than other men's per-ceives the truth. I knew indeed that he was more of a specialist in nervousdiseases, the man to whom Charcot before his death had predicted thathe would reign supreme in neurology and psychiatry.

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