"But Cottard's hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious: 'Purges, violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol.' My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be 'built up,' that I was already very nervy, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would make me worse. I could see in Cottard's eyes, as anxious as if he was afraid of missing a train, that he was wondering whether he had not succumbed to his natural gentleness. He was trying to think whether he had remembered to put on his mask of coldness, as one looks for a mirror to see whether one has forgotten to tie one's tie. In his uncertainty, and in order to compensate just in case, he replied brutally: 'I am not in the habit of repeating my prescriptions. Give me a pen. Now remember, milk! Later on, when we've got the breathlessness and the agrypnia under control, I'm prepared to let you take a little clear soup, and then a little broth, but always with milk; au lait! You'll enjoy that, since is all the rage just now; ole, ole!' (His pupils knew this joke well, for he made it at the hospital whenever he had to put a heart or liver case on a milk diet.) 'After that, you'll gradually return to your normal life. But whenever there's any coughing or choking - purges, injections, bed, milk!' He listened with icy calm, and without replying, to my mother's final objections, and as he left us without having condescended to explain the reason for this course of treatment, my parents concluded that it had no bearing on my case, and would weaken me to no purpose, and so they did not make me try it. Naturally they sought to conceal their disobedience from the Professor, and to make sure of it avoided all the houses in which they might have run across him. Then, as my health deteriorated, they decided to make me follow Cottard's prescriptions to the letter; in three days my 'rattle' and cough had ceased, I could breathe freely. Whereupon we realized that Cottard, while finding, as he told us later on, that I was distinctly asthmatic, and above all 'batty,' had discerned that what was really the matte with me at the moment was toxemia, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys, he would clear my bronchial tubes, and thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength. And we realized that this imbecile was a great physician."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 536-537
I included this section because Cottard, albeit a minor character, does pop up continually, at least through the first two volumes. He is normally presented as a bit of an "imbecile" although here Proust suggests that maybe he was in fact a "great physician." I don't know if he's a great physician but maybe I should send a copy of this section to my father or my sister or my good friend Chris Bolling and get their feedback on the merits of a milk-laden diet to deal with asthma. It makes you wonder how Proust managed to live long enough to finish Remembrance of Things Past, and the last couple volumes were, in fact, published posthumously. Which naturally brings up the second reason why I included this passage: it is a reminder of the poor health that hung like a dark cloud over Proust's entire life. From age nine he suffered from severe asthma, although at the time it was considered more of a nervous condition, and that description of the young Proust is repeated endlessly. After his parents died in the first years of the twentieth century Proust became more and more withdrawn, and convinced, if not marginally terrified, that he would die of a stroke like his mother and father. During his last years he rarely left his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping all day and maniacally writing all night long, as he tried to finish his masterpiece before life finished him. One has to wonder, and I'm clearly not the first person to beg this question, how his poor health impacted his writing. One of his many doctors was the leading theorist of "emotional memory" or "involuntary memory," and that clearly rests at the heart of Remembrance of Things Past. More profoundly, I guess, he was forced to live a very internal life as his health waxed and waned and eventually failed. Proust turned into himself and traversed a much greater universe than me might have ever discovered on his own out in the real world. Finally, this passage reminds me so much of my grandmother Maude, my father's mother. She's always been the one with which I felt the greatest connection mainly because of intellect and personality (she was, as we like to say in Indiana, smart as a whip, but also pretty prickly). Maude suffered from pretty profound asthma her entire life and it, along with a multitude of other physical ailments, turned her into a near recluse over the last years of her life. As I get older I often wonder about the vastness of her internal universe.
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