My Year With Proust - Day 241

But alas, when, a moment later, I bent over to kiss that beloved forehead which had been so harshly treated, she looked up at me with a puzzled, distrustful, shocked expression: she had not recognised me.

   According to our doctor, this was a symptom that the congestion of her brain was increasing.  It must be relieved in some way.  Cottard was in two minds.  Franceoise hoped at first that they were going to apply "clarified cups."  She looked up the effect of this treatment in my dictionary, but could find no reference to it.  Even if she had said "scarified" instead of "clarified" she still would not have found any reference to this adjective, since she did not look for it under "C" any more than under "S" - she did indeed say "clarified" but she wrote (and consequently assumed that the printed word was) "esclarified."  Cottard, to her disappointment, gave the preference, though without much hope, to leeches.  When a few hours later, I went into my grandmother's room, fasted to her neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black reptiles were writhing among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of Medusa.  But in her pale and peaceful, entirely motionless face I saw her beautiful eyes, wide open, luminous and calm as of old (perhaps even more charged with the light of intelligence than they had been before her illness, since, as she could not speak and must not move, it was to her eyes alone that she entrusted her thought, that thought which can be reborn, as though by spontaneous generation, thanks to the withdrawal of a few drops of blood), her eyes, soft and liquid as oil, in which the rekindled fire that was now burning lit up for the sick woman the recaptured universe.  Her calm was no longer the wisdom of despair but of hope.  She realised that she was better, wish, to be careful, not to move, and made me the present only, of a beautiful smile so that I should know that she was feeling better, as she gently pressed my hand.

   I knew the disgust that my grandmother felt at the sight of certain animals, let alone at being touched by them.  I knew that it was in consideration of a higher utility that she was enduring the leeches.  And so it infuriated me to hear Francoise repeating to her with the little chuckle one gives to a baby once is trying to amuse: "Oh, look at the little beasties running all over Madame."  This was moreover to treat our patient with a lack of respect, as though she had lapsed into second childhood.  But my grandmother, whose face had assumed the calm fortitude of a stoic, did not even seem to hear her.

   Alas! no sooner had the leeches been removed than the congestion returned and grew steadily worse.  I was surprised to find that at this stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Francoise was constantly disappearing.  The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep the dressmaker waiting.  In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of "trying-on."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 346-347

I included this odd little section mainly because it is odd, an odd, jumbled collection of events which somehow seems to capture the tragedy and comedy of life.  It starts with the horrible moment when Marcel realizes that his grandmother's condition has so deteriorated that she doesn't recognize him, but then it passes through a treatment of leeches.  On the one hand it seems stunning that doctors were still prescribing leeches as a treatment a century ago, although my friend Craig Pepin paid for a cupping (also mentioned above) when we were in Beijing a few years ago, and both cuppings and leeches were fairly common among my students in the United Arab Emirates when I taught there.  Anyway, I think life is maddening mix of tragedy and comedy, and maybe the key is just to know how to understand that and to create a balance; revel in the comedy and weather the tragedy.

I also love the practicality of Francoise in this section.  She is devoted to Marcel's grandmother but also is gone a lot of the time because she is meeting a seamstress for a series of fittings for a mourning dress that she hopes to never wear. "In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of "trying-on."  One of the great misconceptions of life is that women are the romantic sex.  Rather, it is women who are the hard-headed, practical ones, which is why my excellent friend Heidi Steiner-Burkhardt dominates the Twin Peaks Football League (our fantasy football league).  The rest of us are drafting players because they went to our university or they play for our favorite NFL team or they're Muslims or we have a fond memory of one game they played three years ago that helped a previous incarnation of our wretched fantasy team.  Heidi, our league's evil T 1000 Terminator, just runs the numbers and dominates.