The Mad Women's Ball

by Victoria Mas

  She does not know how long it was before she managed to lift her body up off the floor of the corridor. As she lay there, she had stared in terror and wonder at the door she had just closed. On the other side of that door, something dark and impenetrable had just occurred. She was unable to understand what had happened clearly. Terror had caused her to collapse and now prevented her from thinking rationally. All she could remember was Eugénie’s face – a beautiful face that gave no hint of the evil that seemingly lurked within. The new patient had played a trick on her, a cunning, clever trick, that was all. The girl had tried to make a fool of her, to unsettle her, even if the nurse did not know exactly how she had managed it. In this sense, the new girl was more dangerous than the other patients on the wing. They were just pitiful lunatics, more deranged than malevolent; Eugénie, on the other hand, was intelligent and cynical. It was a dangerous combination.

  At length, Geneviève had summoned the strength to get up. Dazed and bewildered, she had left the hospital and headed along the boulevard; turning right, she had glimpsed the dome of the Panthéon above the rooftops, then had headed down past the bustling cafés; she had passed the railings of the zoological gardens where, for more than a decade, the cries of the wild animals no longer rang out, ever since the Paris Commune had forced the starving citizenry to slaughter the animals so they could feed on their flesh; she had then walked up the narrow cobbled streets behind the Panthéon and around the monument before finally reaching her apartment building.

  Still wearing her uniform, Geneviève lies down on the bed and curls into a ball. Her body feels heavy, her thoughts muddled. Try as she might to reassure herself, she is convinced that something unusual, something strange took place in that room. Rarely has she been overcome by such emotion. On the occasions when it has happened in the past, she has always been able to interpret her feelings. When the patient who reminded her of her sister had tried to strangle her, she had felt betrayed and saddened. But tonight she cannot put a name to what she is experiencing. She knows that she felt suffocated in that room. The words Eugénie said, which she cannot explain, were like a door opening on to a strange, unfamiliar and disturbing world. Having been educated according to the principles of Cartesian logic and scientific reasoning, Geneviève was ill-prepared to witness what ‘talking to the dead’ might really mean. She does not wish to think about it any longer. She wants to forget this evening. Before long, she is asleep; she has not even taken the trouble to light the stove to warm the room.

  In the early hours, she wakes with a start. Instinctively, she sits up in bed and pushes herself back against the wall. Her heart feels as though it might stop beating. She glances around the darkened room. Someone touched her shoulder. A hand reached out and touched her shoulder, she is sure of it. Her eyes adjust to the darkness and gradually she makes out the shapes of the furniture, the shadows, the ceiling. There is no one there. The door is locked. And yet she is sure she felt it.

  She brings a hand up to her face, closes her eyes and tries to control her breathing. Outside, the city is quiet. There are no sounds from within the building either. The clock says 2 a.m. She gets out of bed, pulls a shawl around her shoulders, lights the lamp and sits down at the table. She takes a sheet of paper, dips the nib of her pen in the inkwell and begins to write:

  Paris, 5 March 1885

  Dear Little Sister,

  I feel an urgent need to write to you. It is two o’clock in the morning and I cannot sleep. Or rather, I was asleep, but I was woken by something. I would like to think it was a dream, but the sensation I felt was so real that it could not have been.

  You must be wondering what I am talking about. I am not sure how best to explain what I experienced today. The hour is late and I am still too disconcerted to marshal my thoughts.

  Forgive me if this letter seems confusing, or mad. I will try to give you a more detailed account tomorrow, in the cold light of day.

  Hugs and kisses,

  Your sister who cherishes the thought of you.

  Geneviève sets down her pen and holds the letter up to the light to read it through. She thinks for a moment, then pushes back her chair. Outside, along the rooftops, dark chimney stacks are framed against the night sky. There are no clouds; the city shimmers in the moonlight. Geneviève opens the window. The cold night air bathes her face. She steps forward, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then exhales.

  6

  5 March 1885

  Eugénie is woken by the sound of the key grating in the lock. With a bound, she is standing at the foot of the bed, glancing around the room. For a second, she had forgotten where she is. In this asylum, for madwomen. One more patient among so many, duped by her family, dragged here by the hand that, as a child, she had kissed reverently, respectfully.

  She turns towards the door as it opens and feels a pain in the back of her neck; she brings a hand up to her shoulder and winces. The crude bed, the lack of a pillow, the fitful sleep, have left her stiff and sore.

  A woman is silhouetted in the doorway.

  ‘Follow me.’

  It is not the same nurse as yesterday. The voice is younger and the tone of authority forced. Eugénie thinks again about Geneviève. The matron’s stiff demeanour had reminded her of her father: the same restraint, the same self-control. The difference is that her father is innately harsh; with Geneviève, it is something she has learned. Her austere persona is the result of nurture, not of nature. Eugénie saw it in her eyes. It was all the more evident when her sister’s name was mentioned; this was the moment when Eugénie had understood the grief behind the stark expression.

  Eugénie had not expected a Spirit to appear so soon, especially in the circumstances. She had been sitting with her back to the bed when Geneviève had come into the room. The moment she stepped through the door, Eugénie sensed that she had brought someone with her. A powerful presence determined to be seen and heard. Eugénie had had no choice but to allow the heaviness to wash over her, though she felt she did not have the strength for it – not yet, not here, in this room that was not hers, in this place she found terrifying. It was when Geneviève introduced herself that Eugénie decided to face her. Behind the matron, Blandine was standing in the darkness. Never before had Eugénie seen a Spirit so young. The moonlike face and those red curls reminded her of Théophile. At first, Blandine said nothing, leaving Eugénie to respond to Geneviève’s question. Then she had spoken.

  ‘I am her sister, Blandine. Tell her. She will help you.’

  Bent forward, listening to the voice inside her head, Eugénie had felt the urge to laugh. The situation was absurd. Only this morning, her whole world had changed irrevocably, her freedom traded for confinement. She had spent the day in this dark room where the daylight scarcely entered, between these walls where her father had decided to leave her for the rest of her life. And now, here was a new Spirit who promised to help her. So there was reason enough to laugh, although it would have been a jagged, nervous laugh, so overwrought with emotion it might have tipped her into madness. Thankfully, she had not had the strength, so she had simply smiled. She did not know whether the dead girl had appeared for her or for her sister, but she sensed the Spirit was benign. Besides, she had nothing to lose. She could fall no lower. And so, she had spoken. In a fraction of a second, Geneviève had crumbled. It must have been devastating for a woman determined not to be shaken by anything – a woman who had witnessed every ailment, every illness, every form of suffering that could exist, and had come through unscathed because she willed it so. Seeing that her words had troubled the nurse, that she had succeeded in touching a part of her that no one else had reached, Eugénie thought that perhaps there was a possibility – however uncertain – that she might rally the matron to her cause.

  Because Eugénie had but one thought: to get out of here. Without question.

  The nurse leads Eugénie down the long corridor towards the dormitory. Over her uniform she wears a black apron tied about her ample waist, a
nd pinned to her hair, a white cap – an indispensable accessory to distinguish the nurses from the patients. The clatter of heels echoes around the empty hallways.

  As they pass the arched windows, Eugénie can see the world outside. The place feels less like a hospital than it does a village: the blocks are made up of buildings of pale pink stone that look like bourgeois houses; on the ground floor and the first floor, tall windows allow light to flood the hallways and other rooms – doubtless doctors’ offices and consulting rooms. On the third floor, the windows are reduced to small squares; perhaps these are isolation rooms. On the top floor, dormer windows pierce the deep blue slate roof, offering an aerial view over the trees and the buildings. In the distance, a park criss-crossed by paths on which smartly dressed city women, young and old, stroll about, and bourgeois matrons, hands clasped behind their backs, stand chatting, as though they are indifferent to what goes on within these walls; or perhaps, on the contrary, it piques their curiosity. At regular intervals the buildings are punctuated by archways that allow carriages and landaus to pass through, and from every direction comes the muffled thud of horses’ hooves. From certain angles, the vast black cupola of a monument, soaring above the rooftops, startles and intrigues.

  Wherever she looks, Eugénie can see no obvious signs of madness. On the thoroughfares of the Salpêtrière, people stroll, they meet, they move about on foot or on horseback; the streets and avenues have names; the courtyards are burgeoning with flowers. The air of tranquillity that pervades this little village might almost make one long to live here, to move in to one of the buildings and make a nest. Surveying this bucolic scene, it is difficult to believe that, since the seventeenth century, the Salpêtrière has been the site of so much suffering. Eugénie knows the stark history of this place only too well. There can be no worse fate for a Parisian woman than to be banished to the south-east of the city.

  No sooner had the coping stone been laid than the sorting had begun: at first it was the poor, the beggars, the tramps and vagabonds who were rounded up on the orders of the king. Next came the turn of the depraved, the prostitutes, the women of loose virtue, all these ‘sinners’ brought here in open carts, their faces exposed to the jeering citizenry, their names already vilified in the court of public opinion. Later came the madwomen, young and old, the dotards and the violent, the hysterics and the simpletons, the fantasists and the fabulists. Quickly the buildings were filled with screams and shackles, dirt and double locks. Somewhere between an asylum and a prison, the Salpêtrière took in those that Paris did not know how to cope with: invalids and women.

  From the eighteenth century, for ethical reasons or for want of space, only women afflicted by neurological problems were admitted, the rooms crudely mopped down, the leg irons removed and the overcrowded cells thinned out. And then, of course, there was the storming of the Bastille, the beheadings and the extraordinary turmoil that was to grip the country for many years. In September 1792, the sans-culottes demanded that those imprisoned in the Salpêtrière should be freed; the National Guard obeyed but the women, delirious at being set free, were then raped and executed with axes, clubs and bludgeons on the streets. Truth be told, whether free or incarcerated, women were not safe anywhere. Since the dawn of time, they had been the victims of decisions that were taken without their consent.

  With the arrival of the new century came a glimmer of hope: doctors of some standing took over the running of this hospital for those still dismissed as ‘madwomen’. There were advances in medical knowledge; the Salpêtrière became a place for treatment and research into neurological conditions. New categories emerged for the patients in the various wings of the hospital: hysterics, epileptics, melancholiacs and dotards. The shackles and the rags disappeared, only to be replaced by experiments that were conducted on the bodies of the infirm: ovarian compressors were used to calm hysterical fits; a hot iron inserted into the vagina reduced clinical symptoms; psychotropic drugs – amyl nitrite, ether, chloroform – calmed the nerves of the women; the application of various metals – zinc and magnets – on palsied limbs had genuine beneficial effects. With the arrival of Professor Charcot in the mid-nineteenth century, hypnosis became the new medical trend. The Friday public lectures stole the limelight from the popular theatres; the madwomen of the Salpêtrière were Paris’s new stars; people talked of Augustine and of Blanche Wittmann with contemptuous or carnal fascination. Because madwomen could now evoke desire. Their allure was paradoxical; they aroused both fear and fantasy, horror and sensuality. A fit of hysteria suffered by a hypnotized patient before a rapt audience looked less like a neurological dysfunction than a frantic erotic dance. Madwomen did not provoke terror, but fascination. And it was this same fascination that, several years ago, had given rise to the Lenten Ball – the Madwomen’s Ball – an annual event in the capital. Only those who could boast an invitation were permitted to pass through the gates of a place otherwise reserved for the mentally ill. For one night only, a little of Paris finally came to these women who had so many hopes pinned on this ball: of a look, a smile, a caress, a compliment, a pledge, deliverance. And while they dreamed, the strangers’ eyes would feast on these curious creatures, these dysfunctional women, these crippled bodies, and for weeks they would talk of the madwomen they had seen up close.

  The women of the Salpêtrière were no longer pariahs whose existence had to remain hidden, but entertainment, thrust into the limelight without a flicker of regret.

  Eugénie lingers at one of the windows and gazes out at the bare trees in the grounds. There was a time when these cells were filled with beggarwomen whose fingers and toes were gnawed by rats. There was a time when the prisoners had been set free only so they could be savagely slaughtered at the hospital gates. There was a time when an adulterous woman could be incarcerated simply because she was an adulteress. Today, the hospital seems more tranquil on the surface, but the spirits of these women have never left. This is a place filled with ghosts, with howls, with ravaged bodies. A hospital where the very walls can drive you mad if you were not already mad when you arrived. A hospital where someone is spying from every window, where someone sees or has seen.

  Eugénie closes her eyes and takes a deep breath: she needs to get out of here.

  The young woman is surprised by the scene in the dormitory. The beds are piled with fabric and lace, with feathers and frills, gloves and mittens, bonnets and veils. The patients are busily working on the projects they have chosen, stitching and creating pleats, parading their colourful costumes, twirling their gowns, arguing over scraps of fabric. Some are laughing out loud at an outlandish hat, others are complaining they can find nothing to their taste. With the exception of those few who are indifferent, the old crones and the depressives watching the spectacle with vacant eyes, the women are all jostling, strutting, dancing in a ballet that is theirs alone, and the constant clamour of excited women’s voices is so intoxicating that, at first, it feels less like an asylum and more like some kind of feminine paradise.

  ‘You sit over there.’

  The nurse gestures to a bed. Eugénie bows her head and makes her way through the throng, simultaneously astonished and intimidated by the festive gaiety in such a grim setting. Discreetly, trying to make sure no one notices her, she sits down between two of the beds, and retreats until her back is pressed against the wall. The dormitory is vast. There must be at least a hundred women here. On the far side of the room, tall windows overlook the gardens. Nurses keep a watchful eye on the patients without joining in the festive spirit. As Eugénie looks around the room, her eyes meet those of Geneviève. Standing at the other end, she is staring at the girl with undisguised contempt. Eugénie looks away and pulls her legs up to her chest. She feels a surge of discomfort. Her every movement is being scrutinized and analysed, her every flaw, as though it is essential to find some minor fault, some defect to justify her incarceration. Around her, the women whirl excitedly, but it is clear that their mood is brittle: the slightest equivocat
ion could bring everything crashing down and provoke a collective fit of hysteria. This atmosphere, a mixture of euphoria and desperation, only serves to heighten Eugénie’s unease. Staring at the tumult of costumes and bonnets, she begins to make out the twisted hands, the faces contorted by tics, the expressions that range from melancholy to unnatural gaiety, the legs that limp beneath the dresses, the listless bodies beneath the sheets. The place exudes a sour metallic odour, of ethanol mingled with sweat, that makes her want to throw the windows wide open and let in the fresh woody scents of the garden. Eugénie looks down at the dress she has been wearing since the previous morning: she would give anything to be able to go home, bathe and sleep between her own sheets. That this is impossible underscores the reality of her situation. Everything that was familiar has been brutally ripped away without her consent, and she will never get it back. For even if she should manage to leave this place – but how, and when? – she could not knock at her father’s door. Her life as she has known it, everything that has made her who she is – the books, the clothes, even her privacy – now belongs to the past. She has nothing now; she has no one.

  Her fingers clutch the sheets, her knuckles white. Bending forward, she squeezes her eyes shut and chokes back a sob. She does not want to lose control – not so soon, and certainly not in front of the nurses. The matron would be only too happy to see her burst into tears and send her back to isolation.

  A childlike voice nearby makes her open her eyes again.

  ‘You new here?’

  Louise is standing next to Eugénie. Her face is round, her cheeks delicately pink. Every year, as the ball draws near, the girl is gripped by all the excitement. Every March she comes alive, her face beaming and radiant, only to revert to a vacant stare as the rest of the year rolls by. As if, by some miracle, her fits of hysteria abate during this period – as they do for some of the other women.