The Green Muse

by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  The crowd had a festive aspect; there was much laughter, and the sound of lunches being unwrapped. The women wore bright hats and flirted among the medical students. Dr. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were open to the public. Sometimes Toulouse-­Lautrec was there, or the writer Edmund de Goncourt; once Sarah Bernhardt had been seen among the crowd. Dr. Charcot had been accused of creating a hystericulture, with his leçons du Mardi the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. On Fridays he gave by-­invitation-­only lectures in neurology, outlining his taxonomic classifications of epilepsy and hysteria, and putting forth new postulations.

  But Tuesday’s lectures were by far more interesting to the lay spectator, having an almost theatrical aspect to them. At his leçons du Mardi, Dr. Charcot examined new patients he had not seen before, diagnosing them right in front of the crowd, discussing treatment and prognosis as he had them variously make movements with their arms and legs to see if they displayed the chronic contractions common to the hysteric.

  And there I was, this Tuesday morning. Already I was to not only to see and hear one of the doctor’s lectures but to help document it as well.

  A hush fell on the crowd as outside the window a bird sang. Richet paused, about to slide a prepared glass plate into the camera. Dr. Charcot behaved as though the room were empty. He had walked in with two colleagues, and they were in the midst of an intense conversation.

  “—­the waxy plasticity of the catatonic—­” I heard, and “—­hysterical paralysis.” I could feel anticipation’s tight halo around my head.

  Dr. Charcot walked over to a dark wooden podium at the center of the stage, and the men with him went and stood behind, their hands and faces respectful and expectant. The crowd shifted and rustled quietly, then there was silence again.

  “Greetings, ladies and gentlemen,” the doctor began. Richet motioned to me and I moved closer to the camera resting on its oak tripod. Richet bent his eye to the lens, and the first hysteric was escorted into the room, held at each arm by an attendant.

  She was young, wearing a coarse, ivory-­colored shift. The attendants were having some trouble getting her into the room. She did not so much resist as seem to stumble through some unseen rocky meadow of which only she was aware. Her eyes seemed fixed on something far away, her body unconscious of being pulled along through this flat, brightly lit reality.

  The orderlies positioned her in the middle of the low stage. The lighting dimmed, which rendered the walls black and the atmosphere even more expectant. From where I stooped next to Richet I applied a taper with a percussive motion to a metal sheet containing flash powder, and in the sudden glare of white light Richet snapped a picture. I handed him a new plate as he passed me the old, which I slid quietly into the holding box, aware of the movements of my hands, the muscles tightening and loosening; the woman stood exactly as she had been placed, soft and immobile like rotting wood.

  “Note the lack of expression in the eyes and face, the flaccid limbs,” Dr. Charcot began. “An hysterical trance may last for days; I have known of some that have lasted for weeks. This girl was brought in several days ago. Since she arrived, she has refused to eat. And every night she has been heard crying herself to sleep. Two of her aides have seen her go into paroxysms, although as yet they have been of the milder form.

  “Now, let me show you. Two main causes of hysteria are irregularity of the menstrual cycle, and insanity. In this particular case—­” The girl began to swallow convulsively, as though she could not breathe. But the doctor continued.

  “We have not yet studied the patient to determine the root cause of the problem. But the manifestation of symptoms is consistent with . . .” The girl brought a hand to her throat. She massaged her neck, bringing back her head until she could have seen the dark ceiling of the Amphitheatre had her eyes not stopped in their upward arc to stare suddenly into my face with the terror of a small, cornered animal. Her mouth moved. Dr. Charcot glanced at her, then back at his audience.

  “To quote Diderot,” the doctor said, “the woman bears within an organ prone to terrible spasms.” The girl’s cheeks flushed with blood, drained of blood. He paused to laugh. “Of course, we men of science know today that the uterus is not the actual cause of hysteria. We no longer believe, for example, that the organ of reproduction moves about the female body in extremis. But the womb is, in essence, the woman. It signifies her purpose, her very reason for being. And, as such, it serves as an excellent metaphor.” Pens scraped paper: Woman as womb.

  “This organ uses her and arouses ghosts of all kinds in her imagination. It is in hysterical delirium that she returns to the past, hurls herself into the future, and that all times are present to her. It is indeed a powerful metaphor, my friends, because Woman is capable of being haunted only by the spectres of the female imagination. It is always, always a question of the genitals.”

  The girl’s eyes were crying, but her face had become impassive as stone.

  “This girl,” the doctor said, gesturing without looking in her direction, “is lost in that most fertile place in the feminine imagination: Love.” A titter ran through the crowd, and suddenly I felt my own cheeks blazing. My body went rigid and the glass plate I was preparing snapped in two. Richet glanced at me.

  “Everything about this girl announces the hysteric. See how she stands, her hands clasped below her waist, at once protecting and calling attention to the most private and female part of her anatomy. Her posture, too, is a dissimulation. How erect her stance, how demure and womanly. And yet is this not also, in combination with her clasped hands, a posture designed to draw attention to the breasts? Obviously there is an excess of pride, as well as a well-­masked eroticism, in the very way in which she holds herself in front of a crowd of ­people. I myself saw this girl enter the hospital, and she was bent and crying: There was no audience present.

  To me she seemed, moment to moment, to be less and less aware of the audience. Her body seemed frozen, not with fear or even defiance; she had left the stage. The brief wetness of her eyes had been the last protest: Now there was nothing but a shell to be stared at and discussed. She was not seeking attention but fleeing it.

  Dr. Charcot turned to her.

  He looked at her steadily for a long moment. The he said brusquely, “We shall begin.”

  The audience held its breath.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, and she did so. Without speaking the doctor walked over and lightly pressed his thumbs against her eyelids. She startled, and he placed his fingers firmly on each side of her face, her temples, as if in a vise. Slowly, softly, her face relaxed, her shoulders, her frightened arms. Her eyes fluttered half-­open and remained that way. Dr. Charcot stepped away, his right arm held stiff, his fingers pointed slightly down. The girl’s head dropped abruptly to the side, her face turned away, presenting him with a cheek as demure as any schoolgirl’s.

  “Augustine,” said Dr. Charcot. “Raise your left arm.” The girl, Augustine, I thought, what a pretty name; I was holding my breath, Augustine too, made no movement, then with no change in her seemingly unconscious face, slowly started to raise her arm, and the audience breathed.

  When her arm had risen to shoulder height, Dr. Charcot said, “Stop.”

  The doctor stood thus a long time, and I watched the placid rise and fall of her pretty breasts, and I felt ashamed of myself.

  “A similar technique has been used with equal success,” Dr. Charcot said, “on chickens.” Another, louder titter of amusement ran through the crowd.

  “With a well-­practiced patient who hypnotizes quickly,” Dr. Charcot continued, “it is enough to abruptly place the hand on the head, and she falls as if struck by lightning.” The girl did not seem as if struck; she had merely turned away. Richet had relinquished the camera to me, and I looked at her three-­quarter profile through the lens to avoid having to feel. She looked, for the first time she had set foot on the stage,
at peace. She looked to be under a spell: Sleeping Beauty. The Master had worked his magic, and now she belonged to him.

  Chapter 17

  Charles

  RECENTLY I HAD begun to feel a certain ennui. Not with V; each semi-­lit encounter enslaved me anew, and she had become to me as necessary as air or absinthe. No, it was the particulars of my daytime hours that had begun to pall: subsumed each night by animal pleasures, my waking self became pallid and dull. The pearl skies of Paris began to look merely gray, and all food lost its taste. My nerves, accustomed as they were to the nightly stimulation of absinthe, V, and the removal of all ordinary moral constrictions, had left me debilitated during the daylight hours, a vampire unable to rest in the dust of his homeland, because my homeland had become nothing less than that intoxicating nightscape.

  V noticed my discontent. We were seated at the dinner table one evening, the French doors open to the balmy night. The sounds of hoofbeats and carriage wheels came into the room as if from far away, the sound of voices like the hum of insects. V was gay, and leaned toward me over the table that I might see her breasts rising out of her chemise. She was not dressed; although we had made love hours before, she had remained in the slip in which I had taken her, only throwing a long garnet silk shawl over her shoulders as the air cooled. There was a faint chill that made me restless in a pleasant way; I would gladly have packed a bag and boarded a ship to India had V suggested it.

  “You are not yourself, Charles,” she said. “Or rather, you are yourself, for the first time in days, and I can tell that you need excitement.”

  “You are quite enough excitement for me, my love,” I said, but I did not feel it. She was right, I was on the edge of something.

  “I think I know what you need,” she said, and although she started mixing a glass of absinthe I knew that was not what she meant—­at least, not all she meant.

  I loved to watch V mix my poison. She caressed the bottle, the spoon, she made each step almost a form of foreplay. And yet I could never get her to drink even the smallest sip; my addiction was the only thing V would not share with me. I waited, I watched her mix my drink, I felt the water dripping over the sugar cubes as if it were a taste and not a sound. She slid the glass over to me and I drank, and waited for what she was going to offer me.

  I had once seen, as a child, an Anatomical Venus. She lay recumbent under glass, nude on black satin pillows. She was wax, but she was real to me. Her skin was as supple and shaded as that of a living woman. Her face was articulated down to the eyebrows, every fingernail and toenail in place. She was a woman, and she was perfect. She had long straight brown hair fanned across the satin pillow beneath her head. Her eyes were half-­open. Around her neck was a string of pearls.

  She lay on her back in a museum, her lips half-­parted, looking vacantly toward heaven. Her right hip was flexed, her leg slightly raised, her knee bent, accentuating the perfect line of thigh and calf. One arm lay straight, the other bent at the elbow. On both hands all fingers but the index were lightly clenched, as though she were grabbing the satin sheets beneath her buttocks, as though she were threatened from above. Her head lay back, arched at the neck, demure with her half-­open mouth and supplicant hands. What was poised above her, a threat or a pleasure?

  She was split open from her throat to the meeting of her legs.

  She was a doll used during the last century to reveal the intricate workings of Woman’s body. Each organ was nestled in its proper place; there was even a little fetus in the waxen womb.

  I stood in front of the glass case as if in front of a great reliquary in some ancient cathedral. There were paintings, statues, rarities from all over the world, but for me there was nothing but her. I wanted to lift the glass. I wanted to touch her face. I wanted to see if the curve of her hip would be warm. I wanted to reach inside her perfect body, to run my fingers over the recesses of her wounds, to put my hands around her organs. Diamonds in a waxy mine.

  I wanted that body to be real.

  V made me wait a week, the vixen. Then we dressed one day and had our lunch at a café some blocks from the Hôpital Salpêtrière. V liked to walk, even in cold and inclement weather; such small discomforts made her feel alive. I think she could have lived naked in the woods on nuts and berries, a dryad, not a woman, freezing in her tracks at the sight of a human man, who in passing would note only the gleaming white bark and graceful limbs of an extraordinary tree.

  And it was indeed a cold for a spring day, and V’s small hand was in my pocket as we walked, both of us warmed inside by the love we had made that morning, a satisfying lunch, and, in my case, two glasses of my green poison. We were merry, as if going to the theater. I had no idea, and would have none for quite some time, of what V really desired when she took me to La Salpêtrière.

  THE HYSTERIC’S BODY was displayed so completely that she might as well have been naked before our gaze. Her body was ours, served up as it was on the dry plate of neurological analysis. The hysterical contractures of the throat: and the tall young country girl arched her neck and looked toward heaven, her neck muscles working as though she could not breathe. The lesions of the cerebral cortex: and her eyes were lidded. She gasped, it could have been for air or kisses.

  She moved with the precision of an artificial thing. She was altogether charming in her dishabille, in her silence, in her desperation. Her eyes, crystal blue, might well have been marbles for all the expression they conveyed, but I could read the signs of her passion in her fingers, which were so stiff the tendons stood out in ridges; her fingers were splayed, and bent unnaturally, each one stretched and tensed as if reaching toward some unreachable escape, as though each finger knew that it could not reach, would never reach, whatever key or ledge or doorknob would bring her freedom.

  And that was her charm, of course. She was trapped, and she knew it. Even her mind was not free. She was trapped by Dr. Charcot’s orders, by the gaze of the crowd, the gaze of the camera, trapped within the confines of the madness that predicted and determined her actions.

  She is trapped as well within her mind: What reaches her from Dr. Charcot’s mouth? Raise your left arm. And with her somnambulist’s eyes, she responds: She raises her arm. But we cannot know what Augustine sees. We cannot know what it is Augustine thinks she is doing: responding to her master’s orders or reaching toward freedom? His voice: Is it a touch, a caress? Is it a sound at all? A roar to which she reacts in fear? If she hears words, what words are they? A mother’s reassuring murmurs? A lover’s imprecations? A gentle threat? Because his voice is firm but he cajoles, his voice is iron velvet, both the key and the ropes that bind. Because she is bound, Augustine, she is bound by his voice, and our eyes, by the stiff cotton shift she wears, by the silken bonds of her exquisite madness, tight against her slim wrists, her neck, her stubborn, rigid hands.

  She could not have been more beautiful, and I would have had her for myself. And yet when I turned to V she was biting her lip, and her eyes were dreaming. She seemed totally absorbed in the moment, rapt with this slave of Dr. Charcot’s. The girl’s face had by degrees assumed a masklike aspect, hardening into the frozen immobility of fear. It happened with great delicacy; Dr. Charcot was murmuring, his hand lightly touching her shoulder, his eyes lit with expectancy. The girl’s hand fluttered up in front of her face; her body did not move at all, but rather went rigid. She seemed trapped in the face of something unspeakable.

  I scanned the crowd. It had become almost completely still, completely silent. Every face was suffused with delight. This girl’s palpable terror was so artificial and yet so obviously truly felt that it was like being privy to a stranger’s nightmare. I looked again at V’s face, and she in turn smiled up at me—­a smile of complicity. She saw what I saw: a young girl’s terrified expectancy at the approach of her lover.

  And then my attention was caught by one of the two men engaged in taking photographs of the proceedings. He
was sliding new plates into his camera. His face arrested me. He alone, out of all the voracious crowd, showed pity. Even the most sedate matron in Dr. Charcot’s Amphitheatre had something of the observer’s victorious glow. Because surely this girl’s agony belonged, somehow, to all of them, the entire crowd had become complicit in her dejection. She belonged to all of them, she was their doll. Even the most prudish observer had become a voyeur.

  But not the man behind the camera. He alone saw through the farce to the human being inside the terrified blue eyes. His hands were not gentle with the plates—­I heard it when he slammed them home. His eyes held both a rage and a sorrow infinitely deep. He almost seemed ready to rush the stage. And yet I could see that he was restrained. He did not want to frighten the girl.

  The doctor lectured.

  “A woman’s sanity, after all, depends on regular doses of sexual gratification. And yet in Woman there is no way to express these urges. Green disease is always a manifestation of the frustration of sexual desire in the female. Marrying her off to a lusty young farm boy would almost certainly have enabled her to express her womanly needs in such ways as are appropriate to its nature: not simply sexual gratification but children, a home to care for, in short. She would have no time to think about herself. Self-­examination in such a patient can be pernicious: To quote the lawyer for a woman accused of the crime of murder, ‘The mind becomes troubled when the senses have not been not satisfied.’ And unpleasant as it may be to accept the voracious and essentially primitive nature of Woman’s sexuality, we men of science must make the attempt.

  “Note the fixed quality of the eye. The gaze does not falter, and yet it stares as if into some unquiet oblivion.

  “Now to the lips. See how they are parted in an almost sensual abandonment. And yet this ecstasy is accompanied by the most painful respiration: The unrestrained sensualist is struggling for breath. The loss of reason in Woman is so often accompanied by this letting loose, as it were, of the unbridled nature of her sexuality.”