I’ve heard people say that it is a drug to make one sleep.” “You are not answering my question,” replied the Professor, who, thrice weekly, at the Faculty, sat on the board of examiners. “I don’t ask you whether it makes you sleep or not, but what it is. Can you tell me what percentage it contains of amyl and ethyl?” “No,” replied M. de Cambremer with embarrassment. “I prefer a good glass of old brandy or even 345 Port.” “Which are ten times as toxic,” the Professor interrupted. “As for trional,” M. de Cambremer ventured, “my wife goes in for all that sort of thing, you’d better talk to her about it.”
“She probably knows just as much about it as yourself. In any case, if your wife takes trional to make her sleep, you can see that mine has no need of it. Come along, Léontine, wake up, you’re getting ankylosed, did you ever see me fall asleep after dinner? What will you be like when you’re sixty, if you fall asleep now like an old woman? You’ll go and get fat, you’re arresting the circulation. She doesn’t even hear what I’m saying.” “They’re bad for one’s health, these little naps after dinner, ain’t they, Doctor?” said M. de Cambremer, seeking to rehabilitate himself with Cottard. “After a heavy meal one ought to take exercise.” “Stuff and nonsense!” replied the Doctor. “We have taken identical quantities of food from the stomach of a dog that has lain quiet and from the stomach of a dog that has been running about and it is in the former that digestion is more advanced.”
“Then it is sleep that stops digestion.” “That depends upon whether you mean oesophagic digestion, stomachic digestion, intestinal digestion; it is useless to give you explanations which you would not understand since you have never studied medicine. Now then, Léontine, quick march, it is time we were going.” This was not true, for the doctor was going merely to continue his game, but he hoped thus to cut short in a more drastic fashion the slumbers of the deaf mute to whom he had been addressing without a word of response the most learned exhortations. Whether a determination to remain awake survived in Mme. Cottard, even in the state of sleep, or because the armchair offered no support to her head, it was jerked mechanically from left to right, and up and down, in the empty air, like a lifeless object, and Mme. Cottard, with her nodding poll, appeared now to be listening to music, now to be in the last throes of death. Where her husband’s increasingly vehement admonitions failed of their effect, her sense of her own stupidity proved successful. “My bath is nice and hot,” she murmured, “but the feathers in the dictionary…” she exclaimed as she sat bolt upright. “Oh! Good lord, what a fool I am. Whatever have I been saying, I was thinking about my hat, I’m sure I said something silly, in another minute I should have been asleep, it’s that wretched fire.” Everybody began to laugh, for there was no fire in the room.
[Note: In the French text of Sodome et Gomorrhe, Volume II ends at this point.]
“You are making fun of me,” said Mme. Cottard, herself laughing, and raising her hand to her brow to wipe away, with the light touch of a hypnotist and the sureness of a woman putting her hair straight, the last traces of sleep, “I must offer my humble apologies to dear Mme. Verdurin and ask her to tell me the truth.” But her smile at once grew sorrowful, for the Professor who knew that his wife sought to please him and trembled lest she should fail, had shouted at her: “Look at yourself in the glass, you are as red as if you had an eruption of acne, you look just like an old peasant.” “You know, he is charming,” said Mme. Verdurin, “he has such a delightfully sarcastic side to his character.
And then, he snatched my husband from the jaws of death when the whole Faculty had given him up. He spent three nights by his bedside, without ever lying down. And so Cottard to me, you know,” she went on, in a grave and almost menacing tone, raising her hand to the twin spheres, shrouded in white tresses, of her musical temples, and as though we had wished to assault the doctor, “is sacred! He could ask me for anything in the world! As it is, I don’t call him Doctor Cottard, I call him Doctor God! And even in saying that I am slandering him, for this God does everything in his power to remedy some of the disasters for which the other is responsible.” “Play a trump,” M. de Charlus said to Morel with a delighted air.
“A trump, here goes,” said the violinist. “You ought to have declared your king first,” said M. de Charlus, “you’re not paying attention to the game, but how well you play!” “I have the king,” said Morel. “He’s a fine man,” replied the Professor. “What’s all that business up there with the sticks?” asked Mme. Verdurin, drawing M. de Cambremer’s attention to a superb escutcheon carved over the mantelpiece. “Are they your arms?” she added with an ironical disdain. “No, they are not ours,” replied M. de Cambremer. “We bear, barry of five, embattled counter-embattled or and gules, as many trefoils countercharged. No, those are the arms of the Arrachepels, who were not of our stock, but from whom we inherited the house, and nobody of our line has ever made any changes here.
The Arrachepels (formerly Pelvilains, we are told) bore or five piles couped in base gules. When they allied themselves with the Féterne family, their blazon changed, but remained cantoned within twenty cross crosslets fitchee in base or, a dexter canton ermine.” “That’s one for her!” muttered Mme. de Cambremer. “My great-grandmother was a d’Arrachepel or de Rachepel, as you please, for both forms are found in the old charters,” continued M. de Cambremer, blushing vividly, for only then did the idea for which his wife had given him credit occur to him, and he was afraid that Mme. Verdurin might have applied to herself a speech which had been made without any reference to her.
“The history books say that, in the eleventh century, the first Arrachepel, Mace, named Pelvilain, shewed a special aptitude, in siege warfare, in tearing up piles. Whence the name Arrachepel by which he was ennobled, and the piles which you see persisting through the centuries in their arms. These are the piles which, to render fortifications more impregnable, used to be driven, plugged, if you will pardon the expression, into the ground in front of them, and fastened together laterally. They are what you quite rightly called sticks, though they had nothing to do with the floating sticks of our good Lafontaine.
For they were supposed to render a stronghold unassailable. Of course, with our modern artillery, they make one smile. But you must bear in mind that I am speaking of the eleventh century.” “It is all rather out of date,” said Mme. Verdurin, “but the little campanile has a character.” “You have,” said Cottard, “the luck of… turlututu,” a word which he gladly repeated to avoid using Molière’s. “Do you know why the king of diamonds was turned out of the army?” “I shouldn’t mind being in his shoes,” said Morel, who was tired of military service. “Oh! What a bad patriot,” exclaimed M. de Charlus, who could not refrain from pinching the violinist’s ear. “No, you don’t know why the king of diamonds was turned out of the army,” Cottard pursued, determined to make his joke, “it’s because he has only one eye.”
“You are up against it, Doctor,” said M. de Cambremer, to shew Cottard that he knew who he was. “This young man is astonishing,” M. de Charlus interrupted innocently. “He plays like a god.” This observation did not find favour with the doctor, who replied: “Never too late to mend. Who laughs last, laughs longest.” “Queen, ace,” Morel, whom fortune was favouring, announced triumphantly. The doctor bowed his head as though powerless to deny this good fortune, and admitted, spellbound: “That’s fine.” “We are so pleased to have met M. de Charlus,” said Mme. de Cambremer to Mme. Verdurin. “Had you never met him before? He is quite nice, he is unusual, he is of a period” (she would have found it difficult to say which), replied Mme. Verdurin with the satisfied smile of a connoisseur, a judge and a hostess. Mme. de Cambremer asked me if I was coming to Féterne with Saint-Loup.
I could not suppress a cry of admiration when I saw the moon hanging like an orange lantern beneath the vault of oaks that led away from the house. “That’s nothing, presently, when the moon has risen higher and the valley is lighted up, it will be a thousand times better.” “Are you staying any time in this neighbourhood, Madame?” M. de Cambremer asked Mme. Cottard, a speech that might be interpreted as a vague intention to invite and dispensed him for the moment from making any more precise engagement. “Oh, certainly, Sir, I regard this annual exodus as most important for the children. Whatever you may say, they must have fresh air.
The Faculty wanted to send me to Vichy; but it is too stuffy there, and I can look after my stomach when those big boys of mine have grown
