From the wings, Geneviève looks out over the auditorium. A rumble of bass voices from the wooden benches fills the hall, which looks less like a hospital lecture theatre and more like a museum, or a cabinet of curiosities. The walls and the ceiling are decked with paintings and engravings in which one can marvel at anatomical drawings, bodies, scenes of anonymous figures, clothed or naked, alarmed or lost; next to the benches there are large glass-fronted wooden cabinets, warped and cracked by time, and within them are displayed all the things a hospital might choose to preserve: skulls and other bones, tibias, humeri, pelvises, dozens of specimen jars, marble busts and a jumble of medical instruments. Already, by its outward trappings, this auditorium promises the spectator a singular experience.
Geneviève studies the audience. Some of the faces are familiar; she recognizes doctors, writers, journalists, interns, political figures, artists, every one of them curious, convinced or sceptical. She feels proud. Proud that there is but one man in all of Paris who commands such intrigue that he can fill this auditorium every week. And here he is, stepping on to the stage. The vast hall falls silent. With his imposing stature and serious expression, Charcot has little difficulty commanding the attention of this rapt audience. The tall figure evokes the elegance and dignity of a Greek statue. He has the penetrating yet inscrutable gaze of a doctor who, for years, has been studying women at their most vulnerable, women who have been rejected by their families and by society. He knows the hope he occasions in his patients. He knows that all Paris knows his name. Authority has been conferred on him, an authority he wields in the belief that he has been given it for one reason: so that his talent might further the cause of medicine.
‘Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for attending. What will follow is a demonstration of hypnosis on a patient afflicted with acute hysteria. She is sixteen years old. In the three years since her arrival at La Salpêtrière, we have documented more than two hundred attacks of hysteria. By means of hypnosis, we can recreate these crises and study the symptoms. In turn, these symptoms will teach us something about the physiological process of hysteria. It is thanks to patients like Louise that science and medicine are able to progress.’
Geneviève gives a half-smile. Every time she watches the doctor address an audience of spectators eager for the coming demonstration, she remembers his early days at the hospital. She has seen him study, observe, heal, research, discover things that no one before him had discovered, think as no one before him has thought. Charcot is the living embodiment of medicine in all its integrity, its truth, its utility. Why worship gods when men such as Charcot exist? No, that is not quite right: no other men such as Charcot exist. She feels proud, yes, proud and privileged to have spent almost twenty years contributing to the work and progress of the most renowned neurologist in Paris.
Babinski ushers Louise on to the stage. Though overcome by nerves ten minutes earlier, the girl now adopts a different air: as she steps out to face her waiting audience, she thrusts her shoulders back, her bosom forward, holds her head high. She is no longer afraid: this is the moment of glory, or recognition. For her, and for the master.
Geneviève knows every phase of this ritual. First, the pendulum set slowly swinging before Louise’s face, her motionless blue eyes, a tuning fork struck once, the girl falling backwards, her limp body caught just in time by two interns. Eyes closed now, Louise responds to the slightest request, at first executing simple movements, raising her arm, turning around, bending a leg, an obedient tin soldier. Then she poses as she is bidden: folds her hands in prayer, lifts her face to beseech heaven, adopts the attitude of crucifixion. Gradually, what seemed to be a simple demonstration of hypnosis evolves into a grand spectacle, ‘the phase of great movement’, Charcot announces. Louise now lies on the ground; there are no further instructions. Alone, she judders, twists her arms, her legs, pitches her body to left and right, turns on to her back, on to her belly, her hands and feet contract and become utterly still, the expressions on her face veer from ecstasy to pain, her contortions punctuated by guttural breaths. Those of a superstitious bent might think her possessed by some demon; indeed, some of the men in the audience discreetly make the sign of the cross. One last spasm leaves her sprawled on her back. Pressing her head and her bare feet against the floor, she arches her body, creating a perfect arc that extends from throat to knee. Her dark hair brushes the dust of the stage, her vaulted back creaks with the strain. At length, having suffered this paroxysm imposed on her, she collapses with a dull thud before the dumbstruck spectators.
It is thanks to patients like Louise that medicine and science can progress.
Beyond the walls of the Salpêtrière, in fashionable salons and cafés, people speculate about what Professor Charcot’s ‘clinic for hysterics’ might entail. They imagine naked women running through the corridors, banging their heads against tiled walls, spreading their legs to welcome some imaginary lover, howling at the top of their lungs from dawn until dusk. They picture lunatic bodies convulsing under starched white sheets, faces grimacing beneath a tangle of hair, the wizened countenances of old women, obese women, ugly women, women who are best kept confined, even if no one can say precisely why, since the women have committed no sin, no crime. For those troubled by the slightest eccentricity, whether bourgeois or proletarian, the very thought of these ‘hysterics’ kindles their desire and feeds their fear. Madwomen fascinate and horrify. Were these people to visit the asylum for the late-morning rounds, they would surely be disappointed.
In the vast dormitory, the daily chores are quietly being performed. Women are mopping the floor beneath and between the metal bedsteads; others attend to their perfunctory ablutions with a flannel over basins of cold water; some lie on their beds, overcome by tiredness or their own thoughts, not wanting to engage in conversation; some are brushing their hair, murmuring to themselves in low voices, staring through the window at the sunlight falling on the last traces of snow in the hospital grounds. They range in age from thirteen to sixty-five; they are dark-haired, blonde or redheads, slender or stout; they are dressed, and wear their hair, in the same way they would in town. They move with modest grace. Far from the scenes of debauchery envisaged by those from outside, the dormitory looks more like a rest home than a ward for hysterical women. It is only by looking more closely that the signs of their distress become evident: the taut, twisted hand, an arm held tightly against the chest, the eyelids that open and close like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; some eyelids remain closed on one side and a lone eye stares out. All sounds made by brass or by a tuning fork have been forbidden, otherwise many of these women would instantly fall into a cataleptic state. One woman yawns continually; another is racked by uncontrollable tics; their expressions are weary, vacant or steeped in a profound melancholy. Then, from time to time, the temporary calm of the dormitory is shaken by one of those infamous ‘fits of hysteria’: on a bed or on the floor, the body of a woman writhes, thrashes, struggles against some unseen force; she squirms, she arches, she twists, she attempts in vain to elude her fate. And so, people press around her, a doctor presses two fingers against her ovaries and eventually the pressure calms the madwoman. In the most severe cases, a cloth soaked in ether is held against her nose: the eyelids close and the fit abates.
Far from the image of hysterical women dancing barefoot through the icy corridors, the atmosphere that prevails is the silent, day-to-day struggle for normality.
Around one of the beds, some women have gathered and they are watching Thérèse knit a shawl. A young woman whose hair is plaited into a crown steps towards the woman they call the Tricoteuse.3
‘This one’s for me, isn’t it, Thérèse?’
‘I promised it to Camille.’
‘You’ve been saying you’ll knit me one for weeks now.’
‘I offered you a shawl two weeks ago, but you didn’t like it, Valentine, so now you’ll have to wait.’
‘You’re mean!’
The young woman petulantly walks away from the group; she is no longer aware of her right hand which twists nervously, nor her leg which twitches with regular spasms.
Geneviève, together with another intern, helps Louise back into her bed. The girl, though weakened, manages to summon a smile.
‘Did I do well, Madame Geneviève?’
‘As always, Louise.’
‘Is Dr Charcot pleased with me?’
‘He will be pleased when we have managed to cure you.’
‘I could see them all staring at me … I’m going to be as famous as Augustine,4 aren’t I?’
‘You just get some rest now.’
‘I’m going to be the new Augustine … Everyone in Paris will be talking about me …’
Geneviève pulls the blanket up over the spent body of the girl, whose ashen face still wears a smile as she drifts off to sleep.
Darkness has fallen over the Rue Soufflot. Towering above the steep street, the Panthéon, in whose stony bosom illustrious men are honoured, stands guard over the sleeping Jardin du Luxembourg below.
On the sixth floor of a building, a window is open. Geneviève gazes out at the tranquil street; to her left is the solemn silhouette of the Temple to Great Men, and to her right the gardens where, from early morning, ramblers, lovers and children come to wander the verdant pathways and lawns and marvel at the flowers.
When she returned from her shift in the early evening, Geneviève had followed her usual ritual. First, she had unbuttoned her white coat, automatically checking to see whether there were any stains – usually blood – before hanging it on its little hook; then she had performed her toilette on the landing where she sometimes encountered the other residents of the sixth floor – a mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter, both washerwomen, who had lived alone ever since the woman’s husband died during the Paris Commune. Back in her humble studio apartment, she had heated some soup which she ate without a sound, perched on the edge of her single bed by the light of an oil lamp; then she had come to the window, where she would linger for ten minutes every evening.
Now, standing bolt upright, as though she were still wearing her stiff matron’s uniform, she gazes down at the street, as composed as a lighthouse keeper in his tower. Her contemplation of the glow from the streetlamps is no meditation, still less a reverie – she has no truck with such romanticism; she uses this moment of stillness to slough off the day spent behind the hospital’s walls. She opens the window and allows the breeze to carry away all the things that surround her from morning to night – the sad and sardonic faces, the smell of ether and of chloroform, the clicking of heels on the tiled floors, the echoes of whimpers and sighs, the creak of bedsprings beneath restless bodies. She is distancing herself only from the place; she does not think about the madwomen. They do not interest her. She is not moved by their fate; she is not troubled by their stories. Since the incident that took place during her early days as a nurse, she has ceased to see the women behind the patients. It is a memory that often comes back to her. She remembers watching as the fit took hold of a patient who looked so like her sister, staring as her face convulsed, as those hands reached out and squeezed her throat with the fury of the damned. Geneviève was young; she believed that, in order to help, one had to care. Two nurses had intervened to prise away the hands of the girl in whom she had placed her trust, her empathy. The shock had been a lesson to her. The following twenty years, spent in the company of madwomen, have only served to reinforce that impression. Illness dehumanises; it makes puppets of these women, at the mercy of their grotesque symptoms, rag dolls in the hands of doctors who manipulate and examine every fold of skin; curious animals who elicit only a clinical curiosity. They are no longer wives or mothers or adolescent girls, they are no longer women to be considered or contemplated, they will never be women who are desired or loved; they are patients. Lunatics. Nobodies. At best, her task is to minister to them, at worst, to keep them confined in acceptable conditions.
Geneviève closes the window, picks up the oil lamp, sits at the console table and sets down the lamp. In this room where she has lived ever since she first arrived in Paris, the only luxury is a stove that gently heats the space. In twenty years, nothing here has changed. The corners are marked by the same narrow bed, the same wardrobe containing two smart dresses and a housecoat, the same coal-fired stove, and the same console table and chair that afford her a small space in which to write. The pink wallpaper, yellowed by the years and blistered here and there by the damp, offers the only splash of colour amid the dark wooden furniture. The sloping ceiling forces her to bend her head in places as she moves about the room.
She takes a sheet of paper, dips her pen in the inkwell and begins to write:
Paris, 3 March 1885
My Dear Sister,
It has been some days since I last wrote to you, I hope you will not hold it against me. The patients have been particularly unsettled this week. If one of them should have a fit, all the others follow suit. The long winter often has this effect on them. The leaden sky above our heads for months on end, the icy dormitories that the stoves do little to heat – to say nothing of the winter ailments: all of these things have a profound effect on their mood, as you can imagine. Happily, today we had the first rays of sunshine. And, with the Lenten Ball only two weeks away – yes, already! – they should begin to feel calmer. In fact, very soon we shall take out the old ball gowns from last year. That should do something to raise their spirits, and those of the doctors too.
Dr Charcot gave another public demonstration today. Young Louise was his subject once again. The poor girl imagines she is already as famous as Augustine. Perhaps I should remind her that Augustine so enjoyed her success that she ran away from the hospital – and dressed in men’s clothing, no less! She was a thankless wretch. After everything we did to try to help her, especially Dr Charcot. As I have always said to you, a madwoman is mad for life.
But the session went very well. Charcot and Babinski were able to induce an impressive fit and the audience were satisfied. The lecture hall was full, as it is every Friday. Dr Charcot deserves his success. I dare not imagine what discoveries he has yet to make. Every time, it brings it home to me – a little girl from the Auvergne, the daughter of a humble country doctor, and here I am, assisting the greatest neurologist in Paris! I confess, at the very thought, my heart swells with pride and humility.
It will be your birthday soon. I try not to think about it, it fills me with such sadness. Yes, even now. Perhaps you will think me foolish, but the passing years have had little effect. I shall miss you all my life.
My sweet Blandine. I must go to bed now. I enfold you in my arms and kiss you tenderly.
Your sister, who thinks of you, wherever you may be.
Geneviève re-reads the letter before folding it; she slips it into an envelope and writes the date on the top right-hand corner: 3 March 1885. She gets up and opens the wardrobe, in which several cardboard boxes are stacked next to the dresses on their hangers. Geneviève picks up the topmost box. Inside are more than a hundred envelopes like the one she is holding, each inscribed with a date. With her forefinger, she examines the most recent – 20 February 1885 – then slips the new envelope in front of it.
She replaces the lid, puts the box back where she found it, and closes the wardrobe doors.
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