Saving Lucia

by Anna Vaught

  I will have spread whispers through the hospital. Women! Crones, lunatics, syphilitics, whores: you are all the same for me and we live together. Tonight: we are going out. Believe it. To Boulevard St Germain. And we are going to dance in the streets and drink something good and meet someone you once met. You help me. Sing at the cracked windows and be full throated.

  And the whispers, your songs, will have held good. Our inmates. We stole keys and draughts; things to keep us quiet. Sometimes, we cut up a little rough, but still. We put the staff under lock and, because we are not animals, not feral, we apologised. In some, we saw understanding. In others, not so.

  I had performed for Charcot and his good people on Friday and Monsieur Brouillet was almost done with his painting of me and tonight, at the house of Charcot, there was a special party. I had heard them talking over their plans, though they knew that not. I had never learned to read; an illiterate, for who was I, just an insignificant splash of mad. But you see, you listen, when you are locked up; your imagination does gymnastics. This is what Violet has understood. And in her mind, she has spoken with such vibrancy to us.

  Words come in and sometimes I do not know from where.

  There are clever people in the Salpêtrière and I know, my friends, that there will be as we walk along these streets because I, like the others, have learned to listen and to absorb: sensations, the subtle modulations of stone under my foot. It is not even and I feel it; study. Looks between people and lines that don’t sound quite natural in their mouths, I heard one, once. Was it a visitor? I don’t quite remember. But when people from outside came to the hospital, we listened in hard and ate up those words, their sounds dripping from our tongues. What do I do? Will I get out? How can I survive here? said poor old Adalene, kennelled next to me, exploring what she could do in her mad mind to keep sane; saying this rubbish to a middle-aged man who came once. He looked well dressed and he said, Ah, he said, The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. A famous writer said this.

  He was her husband and he never came again.

  She said nothing to his poetry. I heard tears, though not comfort from him. But I thought about the words, though I disliked the mouth that spawned them. How would it be if we could take our dreams, our imagination, our night reveries, and mould such into a real place? Night after night I thought of that. And of course those lines of Baudelaire. Until your letter came, my dear Violet. Mon petit miracle! Mon passereau en vol!

  And it is Friday. Fête!

  Meine Passerine im flug! beams Bertha. Yes Lucia, my passerine in flight!

  And do you know, continues Blanche, now that we are here, in flight, I had another thing pop into my head. Words that were not my own, but which fitted just right. I may have looked ravishing in Brouillet’s painting, but look closely and at all of us. We are old. Sullied. We do not have that fresh beauty of the woman on the outside. The thought made me sad, but then those poetry words came as I took full grasp of our power and our cunning. And I laughed just now! Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination, I said.

  Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination, say I, Lucia. Oh, I’m sorry, You told me not to do that. But you are right, Blanche: it would only be the man of true imagination who could reckon with us! And that was Proust, you know. You are a book, though you never learned to read, you beautiful, beautiful loon! And I love your Baudelaire poem too.

  So. Today, Friday, Blanche has exhibited in front of the good and great of Paris. She has swooned, and if you have seen the Brouillet painting then you know how she looked. But this is what came next. Tout Paris could not get out; they were locked in their room. It was not on the ground floor and these were not men brave enough to jump, oh no. There were two nurses in the room, steadying Blanche, before, but they jumped: held her. Helped. They would certainly lose their jobs, but the idea was that, in the confusion, who could tell? When in Rome…

  Down the corridors, staff found themselves walled up, confined to their own imaginations while the inmates ran into the streets, or rather while they flew. Some staff drugged in possets, some with needles, in this moment of rebellion and endless time, because what is time to someone who is endlessly mad, one of eight thousand and more, never going home?

  And I have taken up the tale, so she can rest and relish it. The rest is going to be delicious.

  So now. Violet, Blanche, Bertha and I, Lucia. Now with an extraordinary rabble. The saddest thing: that not all eight thousand came, only those who could still brave the rushing walk. Whose limbs were pliable enough to do it and whose minds were not terrified by the sunlight on their faces and the endless altered world beyond the hospital. It is called being institutionalised. But the free would tell their story to the others, wouldn’t they?

  So Blanche. In the fresh air. All this time, all these waiting years, she has been listening, having more access to the conversation of Monsieur and his friends than others in the Salpêtrière, just like Augustine, queen before her, and who escaped because of it. She, Blanche, knows where Charcot lives, what he reads and that he plays the piano. She knows he likes to cook, or be cooked for, rather, at his professional discretion and to understand taste and separate flavours as if it were a dissection. She has her energy restored a little and asks to take up the tale and says, proudly, eyes lighting up: Imagine! There is a book he especially likes: La Physiologie du Goût—yes, like even taste has a body, an anatomy!—by someone called Brillat-Savarin. Charcot, before he was the great neurologist, was the professor of pathology and still, so I hear, when we die, he dissects. They are downstairs, the dead women. I wonder what he finds inside their heads, but I would bet there are no lesions or scars to see. Can he not see the sorrow swarming around us? Can he not see? Still, I heard him talking to the other doctors about this book and, My God, it sounded like a dissection! Of appetite and mood; of taste and wealth. I felt sick.

  As I was saying, Brillat-Savarin was not a Parisian, I learned, but from Bresse: I have never been there. Charcot has, of course. I heard him talk about Brillat-Savarin’s country, of gratin d’écrivesses, a beautiful Bresse chicken, all sorts of wonderful things; mon Dieu, I could hardly bear the deliciousness. Here, well, you can imagine. Bread and slops; watery cabbage stuff. But I heard him speak of his travels and he said, cœur à la crème and talked about pâté as an hors-d’oeuvre. Can you imagine? I ate up those words. When he made me crawl like a dog, as he made Augustine and many others, we were thinking about what it might be to have thick fresh cream in your mouth. To run that succulent pâté across your tongue, your teeth and to tear at a crayfish. And we slavered and drooled and Charcot said, So you see, so you see! They are suggestible, in this state, the hysterics and he didn’t see at all, poor well-fed bastard. Well, tonight, he has a dinner, after aperitifs around his piano, based on the book with all its analysis and meditations. I heard him speaking of it. A banquet. Let’s dine. Let us dine, instead. We shall partake of his humorous feast while he’s locked in his office back at the asylum.

  Oh. Well. Violet and I have had the same menu at St Andrew’s. Tapioca. Sago. Soft-boiled potatoes and nursery fish. That’s what we mental patients have been imbibing. Nothing to excite us. A little broth for Bertha. Slops for Blanche. God love us, what we want is a feast. A feast. Oh, and a hot and tousled bed in a full night. We’re that clever, but it’s not all about the cerebral. Or praying. We have appetites and I say to Blanche Oh for this I cannot wait!

  I am crying relentlessly. Slavering. I look mad.

  And so our passerines fly. In fact, we have to run as it is a little way between the hospital district and the home of Charcot. To the east, Cathédrale Notre Dame; off further to the West, Le Jardin du Luxembourg. Nearby, although not ye
t (I know this, I know this!), is the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, a detail which will be important. It doesn’t exist yet. I don’t exist yet, but here I am and I feel a future for me, at liberty, just to the south-west, as we fly to their dinner.

  Magic?

  Boulevard de l’Hôpital, Quai Saint-Bernard and Quai de la Tournelle. Attend. A delicate left onto Rue des Saints-Pères and so onto Boulevard Saint-Germain and now our passerines are standing on the left bank of the River Seine and the light is purple.

  Oh, how fine. Oh Violet, say I and then, It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. I’ve always loved Baudelaire.

  And much good it did you, dear, Violet snaps back.

  I heard Charcot talk about this street—this place where he lived, says Blanche, and he told of how the boulevard replaced numerous small streets... the Rue Saint-Dominique, Rue des Boucheries... There was one particular thing I remembered: that they destroyed the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés which stood here. Now, much of the old aristocracy lives on this street—I suppose like you, the Honourable Violet! I overheard Charcot saying that the new upper bourgeoisie have their homes on the right bank. When he said that, I felt he was giving himself airs and graces.

  Yes, bloody cheek. This, Violet: Old money is the aristocracy. World famous doctor and he’s still new money!

  In extremis, she will never drop her title. She slightly disgusts me sometimes, but I think, God love her.

  Blanche again: But what of that prison I mentioned? Again he, Charcot, said of it that the cells had been so abominable and so humid that the soldiers incarcerated there had to go to the Val-de-Grâce hospital to recover from their imprisonment. And so many of them had only committed little crimes. I think this street will be haunted and, even with its finery, I do not think I would want to live here. And I heard him speak of how, in 1792, during the Revolution, this, where his house sits now, was the site of one of the September massacres. Many of the dead were priests, you know; those who would not swear to the state. When I heard Charcot speak of this, it haunted my dreams; those priests praying and dying and no-one came. I cannot—I—

  So Violet counsels her friend: Blanche, dear girl, you must stop. Calm. We have all been prisoners of one sort or another, and as Lucia was telling earlier, prisons are legion and various. In different places. At home. Bertha has said the same. Be comforted. But I am the only criminal here, although I’ve managed to make you accomplices, so I tell you to let this go, this train of thought. Think only now of the pretty lights up on the Seine and the dinner we will have. I do not tell you to harden your heart to the suffering of others, but to hold them up before God and to please remember that this minute, this encaged golden minute of our flight, may be all we have. Walk on, beautiful lady.

  Now, ah: could this be the house? Oh yes, how fine indeed. Think of the other women behind us now. All those pockmarked, exhausted mothers and daughters; those slatterns dancing behind you. They look to you.

  Alors, I have the key, announces a jubilant Blanche and in we rush, the many, in past the gilded mirrors, the lilies in tall white vases (Bastards! I will always hate lilies! They are coffin flowers! says Blanche) and there is the front room with the piano and its vast table and the serving women, who rush out in horror and then, through curiosity, creep back in, and point to the delicacies and the book, the Brillat-Savarin, is open on this page and thus in dinner. Blanche cannot read, Bertha is exhausted from their journey, and so it falls to me to read aloud, and laugh as I do.

  Oh dinner. Oh. Oh My God. Described on the page and set out on a silver bookstand. A recipe or a surgical approach. Some of both! The bastard!

  We women have been often used to slops, scared of water and too sad to take care of our own nourishment. Back at St Andrew’s food has been sturdy, but necessarily bland, to keep the excitement down. Give a lunatic a crayfish to bite and suck at? Oh no. A slab of boiled fish; tripe and onions with soft-boiled potatoes; broth: dumplings in a congealed stew, and apple crumble cooked to bastardy. The really desperate ones spoon fed. Now, I laugh again, as I read: I read of status and luxury and the response one is aiming to elicit in guests. In a moment, we’ll all be hysterical again. This is what it says on the displayed pages, for the amusement of his society; I read it all aloud: Oh la la, look what you get, girls! INCOME 30,000 FRANCS, OR MORE:

  A fowl weighing seven pounds, stuffed with truffles, so that it has become a spheroid.

  Pâté Périgord in the form of a bastion.

  A cask of Chambord richly dressed and decorated.

  A pike stuffed with crayfish.

  A pheasant dressed à la sainte alliance.

  Two dozen ortolans à la Provençal.

  At this, we wince and shriek, thinking, Poor ortolans! They are passerines like us. Bloody men! How dare they! Onward with the planned excess. For heaven’s sake:

  A pyramid of sweetmeats, flavoured with rose and vanilla.

  Oh girls, I laugh: Just look at this, it is so funny. Wouldn’t even a loon die of an embarrassment of riches, or for shame?

  Then we all tear at the food, the pyramids and hecatombs, An old woman crunches and chews at the head of the pike, sucking out its juices, while her friend stabs at the crayfish; Violet, missing many teeth, loves the soft rose sweetmeats and Bertha the pheasant. We all share and quarrel at this dinner, slurp wine and enjoy licking our fingers. Light dims outside, inside candles are lit and I begin playing the piano and to sing a little. But they all know that, while this is perfection, what is happening now, they must go back, though altered and differently fed.

  Girls, inmates, all of you, us. We have to fly! calls Violet, echoed by Blanche and by me (a couple of cadences on Charcot’s piano first) and by Bertha. It is a rabble out there. Dim and misty the night, but now a man in a fine suit walks directly towards Blanche, seems to know her; eyes shine in acceptance and familiarity. It is Augustine, dressed as she was when she escaped from the Salpêtrière and all those years of being thought the great neurologist’s mistress. She had been the queen before Blanche, but no man’s whore, she.

  Come with me, Blanche. I have a place to go.

  Augustine, how did you know where I would be?

  Oh, a little bird told me, as I suppose it told you. A letter dropped through the air and landed at my door. I do not live in the finest place, but I have shelter and make enough money with my music.

  Come with me, as if you were my wife, even.

  Never a wife!

  A friend, then. Someone who understands.

  A decision has to be made. Go, Blanche, commands Violet: At least for a while. Augustine escaped and was not found. Tonight, may the same be true of you.

  Feasts, yes. But love, so much love, too. A tousled bed and a full night.

  And with this, our rabble dissolves into the night as Augustine and Blanche, a decent enough couple, though not decorous enough for these parts, walk back towards the Luxembourg Gardens where, on their onward journey to a tawdry apartment, they fade from view. Blanche opens up like a flower; Augustine was luminous: this is how liberty is, but only for the just.

  We left his beautiful house in a great mess, says Violet. Rose sweetmeats trampled into the rugs and crayfish tails on the piano. Still, the fine manners I learned at Mother’s knees and through a well-trained governess didn’t keep me out of a lunatic asylum did it all, dear girls? And just now, oh, it was good to be a sauvage. And there’s no need to translate that, Lucia.

  I call back, in the words of the Brillat-Savarin book, Oh Monsieur! Such dishes we eat only at your house! At length, Blanche will return to us and that shall be another story to tell. I hope I will meet Augustine again and that we can talk about her time at the place some called the Versailles of Pain.

  Something for Violet. Well, she’s been listenin
g to and participating in others’ reveries, so what for her? Isn’t this her book?

  Ah. There would have been much else to change, but all I am wanting now is a quiet end and clear sight. I have my eyes on the hereafter and the moss stones and the lakes and the bay. On quiet cells where I can be pierced by prayer; reading Hopkins! Twilight. Mary. Speak to the Lord Jesus for me. I am very forward and I’m impatient with The Blessed Virgin at this point. My liturgy, now, is not even of its time and definitely not ladylike.

  Did Hannah really call me a crone? By God, Bertha, may she rest in peace and you with her, holding her hand, in your imagination, transfigured by love. But can I remind you that I kept my title so I hope she called me Lady, too?

  Now, as I told you before, I have been reading Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra. Did you know that Virginia Woolf said it was like screaming, that book of hers? I concur. I heard her at night and what she screamed was my scream too. Up they came, poor old blood-eyed Griffith on nights. I said, Up he comes from Cardiganshire! and he said Carmarthenshire! Same thing, said I and he hesitated. I assume he was trotting through the old adage: this old loon can’t tell a hawk from handsaw. Was I aware of what I said? Could I read a map? Know a purple mountain from a dolphin in Cardigan bay? Could I know that Dr Griffith, hey? I caught, briefly, a smile and then he sighed: Oh Miss Gibson, you are giving some trouble!

  Lady Gibson!

  I screamed. Of course I screamed. Hollered, You think it’s madness, that pitch? Well go fack yourself doctors, it’s jolly well not: it’s the right and rational response! And I will not behave like a Lady!

  And also: Do not medicate me. This makes sense! What I am saying?

  From his smile of cognisance, Dr Griffith now attended to what was professional and fitting. Something to settle her, nurse please. She is upsetting the other patients, with the volume and then the cursing.