But then when I went to greet M. [...] was with him I saw that instead of addressing me he turned away [...] his head, appearing to laugh among his neighbours as if
he were making fun of me. His rather too handsome gaze seemed to give him a foolish or insolent appearance when one did not know him but this unfortunate impression was
soon dispelled as soon as one had been introduced to him, one might say that he was better for knowing and no longer looked at you in that way as soon as he saw that you
knew him. I learned that he was M. de Vaugoubert's son, I conceived that his eyes were two immemorial stars which seemed merely to have changed place, I perceived their past.
I might also have been able to read the future of this young man who did not then know it himself; but there was no need for me to consider that. He had just spoken two words.
But the piano tuner armed with his tuning fork has only to strike one note to know to what degree it was out of tune. -
Quite often with a woman who was speaking to me, it was impossible for me to discover anything of the blonde from days gone by, I turned away from her but then quite suddenly
I saw those features smiling at me in the face of her daughter where they had taken up residence, as if there existed for each family a single mask, a single "disguise",
ready and alive, and which, outliving any particular individual, amused itself by remaining for fifteen years on the face of a woman, then disappearing only to be found next,
immediately recognizable, on the face of her daughter which it would desert in turn. It seemed that a short time before his death I had met Cottard but I had not recognized him.
But now I was looking at someone who it seemed to me must be one of Cottard's sons, but he did not just resemble his father, he was a repeat of him, he was like the Cottard who
had taken care of me in the past and who had indirectly brought me into contact with the Swanns. This young Cottard in front of me had the look of someone who was already going
grey, half way to becoming an old man. In order to account for the fact that, indeed, he already was one I was obliged to count up the years, just like on certain winter's days
when we look at the time in order to tell ourselves that the lamps need lighting already. In his face I noticed, still incomplete but in the precess of crystallization, all
those changes in the eyes, the roundening of the nose, the doctor's cold, self-satisfied demeanour. Features that time was in the process of bringing out, of imprinting, and
the head and shoulders too, these were those of doctor Cottard, as if it was not enough that during all those years there was only one of him, as though on the contrary his
presence was indispensable to this universe; one dead Cottard was succeeded by a similar Cottard which had only the right to postpone it slightly until the death of the
previous one, after whom it was necessary that the new one restored to the current humanity which had not suficiently enjoyed the other, those [...] and the no longer present
smile. No doubt this metamorphosis, the necessity of which was not apparent, and which gave to life something of no use, had it not been imposed for a long time and had not nature
cast upon the once pleasing face of the young man a sort of fermentation, stigmata that I had never suspected were there and which were bound to appear, like a black figure
made of wood in a cuckoo clock when the hour struck.
His mother was not with him. Because a great misfortune, worse perhaps even than the loss of her husband, had befallen her. Apart from her children, she had never loved
anybody but him in her life. If she forced herself to survive him, it was in order to be of use to them. But then a letter, though quite cold in tone but full of little details
that the doctor had explained to her differently, brought things to a head for Mme Cottard by revealing that her husband had never ceased to maintain relations with Odette at
regular intervals. It was evidently about her (even though I was never able to guess) that Rachel had wanted to speak to me when she told me about Cottard, who for my part I
assumed was a totally different woman (Duplay): "It seems that he has a very pretty mistress and claims that there is something of me in her". And it was in part perhaps this
certain something, inherited by Gilberte, that had made Robert choose her. Certainly Mme de Forcheville, towards the end of Cottard's life which she appears to have shortened,
only exceptionally practised her former profession of courtesan. But to have learned it according to the rules and practised it fully, there remained in the performance of her
caresses somethin inimitable which, a few years ago, still distinguished survivors from the bygone Theatre. Perhaps one could even have criticized her from this point of view
for her somewhat too Conservatoire performance. It was astonishing to see her always precede or follow certain kisses with a series of flourishes of the kind that without which
the masters of "bel canto" thought they could not leave the stage. Similarly it was not only behind her mischievous and clear laugh that accompanied her society conversation
(to be placed when I see Mme de Gallifet at her house) that one could recognize in her the great courtesan, shaped at the end of the Second Empire, but in the style in which
she sang certain snatches, always the same ones, of love duets. It was astonishing, not being used to such vocalizations, but we were quickly enchanted and felt ourselves
gratified.
He had known her when she was very young, when she herself was little known (it was he who had introduced her at the Verdurin's later on). Each time he gave her a very
small sum of money and remained with her like an old customer, at the same dirisory payments, even when she had become a great courtesan, then Mme Swann, then Mme de Forcheville,
even when the Duc de Guermantes had showered millions on her; but Odette loved money as much as he did, and like him admitted having clients who barely paid alongside others
who paid a great deal. He still gave her nothing if she had come to him that day seeking a consultation, or if he could offer an invitation card to go and hear him speak at
some or other medical function. He was her "beloved doctor" and perhaps she did more for him, even though he would only give her one louis, things that Swann, and now the Duc
de Guermantes would not have dared ask of her. And that did not prevent her from giving Cottard superior caresses than those that some worthless young women would have made
him pay dearly for. Odette was like those grand fashion houses that provide an old customer with a new lining and new buttons for nothing, only giving them beautiful things out
of a sense of professional honour. (Maybe a single phrase: grand house, great artist, etc.). Mme Cottard never understood an expression that sometimes recurred in those letters:
"To consummate a sacrifice". No doubt Cottard, busy and hard working, and fearing that he would not be at his best in the evening in clever society or that he would keep a patient
waiting too long, often shrank from the fatigues of love. If however Odette encouraged him to agree to them, he must have said: "The sacrifice is consummated. I who did not wish
to consummate the acknowledged sacrifice, am expected at the subcommittee on contagious diseases, it's late." "It's never too late to do the right thing", Odette would reply
tenderly. "We must hurry if we want to consummate the sacrifice". How many times, indeed, even in Mme Cottard's own apartment, even though the sick were waiting in the large
drawing-room with an anxiety worse than their illness, must the walls have heard dialogues such as this? "That's very nice." "That's just why I'm doing it." "It makes me feel
good." "All the better!" "Well, even though I might be a prince of science I'm not made of wood." "I know a thing or two about that." "Let me tell you this: if I find an open
door I go in." "What, does that give you so much pleasure?" Cottard said naively. "How neurotic you are, you don't need to exaggerate. In media res virtus. Everything in excess
is opposed to nature. Do you know who that came from? Hippocrates." Finally he himself was overcome by the pleasure that Odette had only feigned. "That's good you know" he said.
"Come on now, I'll leave the professor to his patients, anyway I have to go, Charles is waiting for me." "What, after all that you bring up the name of Charleton!" "Well then,
who are you complaining about? It's nice and warm in here, I like it." "You like what's good."
Put in small exercise books and Putbus and finish with these words:
Because it is not only on the language of literary criticism, of the novel, of political journalism, of society conversation, on religious eloquence and military writings
that the mediocrity of mind and the instinct for imitation affix their vulgar, endless and fickle seal. All of this disfigures even the words of love of an Odette without it
being apparent, what's more, not only to one such as Cottard, but to a superior man who might take delight in it. Because with words of love, like the "words" in an opera,
we forget their silliness because we do not read them, they are sung.
When I learned of Mme Cottard's sorrow I would have liked to have been able to go and see her since she was not there, just as in the past I would have liked to reassure
Mlle Vinteuil's conscience. It seemed to me that the experience of grief which, since the death of Albertine had outlasted in me the grief itself, would have allowed me to
say some things to her which would have done her some good. I would have told her: "Don't have any regrets about being so unhappy because that proves that you still love him;
if you begin to feel less unhappy it means that you are forgetting, that your love is diminishing. Don't come to despise your suffering, don't imagine any more that he didn't
love you". (It was that idea more than anything that must have hurt her). "From the moment he deceived you, which he took so much trouble to keep you from knowing, it was
because he was afraid of causing you pain, because he respected you and put you first. It was only you who didn't know how much he loved you. He told his mistresses that you
were an angel, that he could not have had the career he had without you. In heaven you are the only one that he will want to see again." I would have told her all this had I
been able to broach the subject, but I knew her so little that I would have offended her by bringing it up. In the same way, around that time I told myself that I would have
liked to be a priest so as to put to profit the qualities that my lack of self-esteem created within me, to do good to others, but that was not my vocation, as I came to
discover later.
If Mme Cottard was not present at the Princesse de Guermantes', her other children were there, however, with their eldest son. Time had come, after the requisite number
of years, to make them resemble their father by this incarnation, given the necessary conditions, as a recognizable type that results in families being so in the same sense
almost as in natural history and they crowded around the buffet, beaks in the air, their eyes undecided, with the bewildered look of young geese. The one who had seemed
defiant and as a child remained immovable with serene seriousness, with the inviolable majesty of a young god, had rapidly made up for lost time; he had become as ugly as
the others, almost as if his placid forehead, his slower grasp seemed like the last vestiges of the marble statue that he had been. And in one of their cousins who I would
never have thought in his appearance had anything in common with Cottard, I saw quite suddenly in the makeup of his cheeks, the very same as Cottard's, which I established
undeniably with the satisfaction of a zoologist. Such repetition of a Cottard seemed unnecessary, but because of our lives being confined within the individual, we believe
that certain peculiarities are inherent to him. In reality, they do not calculate by the individual, whom they do not know, and what ultimately gives them the broad proportions
of natural laws concerning a facial feature, for example, or a character trait, is that they do not always pass discretely and without interruption, so as not to lose
their footing, from father to son, but sometimes veering towards a collateral branch before returning to the direct line, amusing themselves by skipping generations. Just
as it is when we are in the mountains and we do not see the rain in the same way that we see it from a house in the village which is at the bottom, but (like the doctor who
knows that the slight haemorrhage which the patient believes has come from the depths of his being is due to the rupture of a tiny blood vessel that he can tie up at will)
we see that it is falling from a cloud whose shape and dimensions are not in any way formed like those over the village and are not in the depths of the sky, with the result
that above them it is not raining and that through the rain, the alternating zones of sunshine, shadow and rain, here cut a village in two, there bring all three together,
in a word obeying a different and more widespread system. Similarly with Bloch, with young Cambremer, with the Duc, there was a habit of breathing out while taking back
some saliva from time to time, an inversion, a premature unwittingness, which skipped a generation, and thus the whims of nature, more powerful than the whims of the individual,
extend over larger surfaces like the sunshine and shadow on the sea. Yes, at a certain age within that family, just as in winter, even if it is fine and there had been some
sunshine, the daylight tends to fade at half past four, at the age of forty their health changes, the stout man gets thinner, his rustic father wasted and cancerous, appears
in him as an apparition through a sort of magical transparency, wretched as if he had wanted to return to the world for another two years, then returning to the underworld
taking his son with him, who was now one with him. So that if the kinship of my ideas with Beregotte and the similarity of certain phrases, certain forms of language, certain
years spent at the houses of people who were not acquaintances, had demonstrated to me that more wide ranging than individuals there was a single Mind, dispersed across space,
and I understood too that the turns of mind (my fits of anger, those of Bloch's father, etc.) of men do not die with their bodies and are reborn to importune other individuals
that their bodies will not know other than through the instrument of their descendants. So that the two statements had led me to form the idea of an Existence more wide-ranging
than that of individuals, of a single Mind, dispersed across space, and of immortal characters perpetuating themselves through the course of Time.
[Marginal note]
Paperole manuscript for Le Temps retouvé, first published in Commentaire, no. 22, Summer 1983. Now held by the BnF in 'Reliquat' cahier NAF 27350 (1) , 16r-16v.
Created 07.03.26