“I will see you again,” he said. “You show great promise as an hysterical subject. We will meet every few days. Pay special attention to the epileptic patients on your ward.”
I stared.
“That is all.”
The door opened silently and an attendant appeared, although I had not seen him summoned.
Dr. Charcot was not looking at me. I stood.
“You hypnotized me. I did not recognize my own voice.”
We stared at each other. I felt, just as I had in the Amphitheatre, that at any moment I might dissolve.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“Yes. You are an excellent subject. I was able to accurately diagnose you within minutes. Your body responds well.”
“You told me what to do!”
“My dear girl.”
“Augustine.”
“My dear Augustine, the only fit subjects for hypnosis are those who already contain within themselves both the cause and the means to express the cause. My ability lies in allowing you to display as physical acts the turmoil inherent in the trauma driving your hysteria. The hysteric relives her trauma through the spectacular motions of contracture, the arc-en-ciel, the various cries and screams and even laughter.
“You will have your treatments, of course; hydrotherapy is paramount. But it is in hysterical posturing that I expect you to excel.”
I was more frightened than I ever thought I could be.
“You will hypnotize me again,” I said, so softly that he had to ask me to repeat it.
“Of course,” he replied smoothly. “The symptoms the hysteric evinces, from the contractures to the attitudes passionelles, are all in a sense labile. Ideally, the patient responds to minimal prompting a touch, even just a voice that induces the hypnotic state, thereby laying the ground, as it were, for the hysteric to express the details of her trauma, each more pure, even animalistic, than the—”
Then he saw my expression. For an instant there was almost something of ordinary human feeling in his masklike face. Then he looked away.
“You need only trust me,” he said. “That is all.”
I could not tell whether he was dismissing me again or attempting to offer comfort.
“I shall prove an apt pupil,” I said stiffly.
“I want you to watch carefully the women around you. You are being housed in the wing devoted to hysterics and epileptics. My wing. You will see many things here, some of them strange to you. Yet some will seem strangely familiar, for among the hysterics there are quite a few like yourself.”
I blushed again, that curse of red staining my face right down to my bosom.
“Country girls,” he said, as though he did not even see my discomfiture, “who have not been given a suitable outlet for the womanly instincts.” I thought of all the abandoned lace and scarves, the tatting or set of knitting needles forgotten in my lap as Papa and I argued some finer point of the political scene.
“There are distinct phases to an hysterical attack. You can learn a great deal by observation. Your father says that you are a particularly keen observer. Although he also said that what you most enjoyed observing were the latest hats in fashion in Paris.”
The doctor had no notes in front of him; he had made none. He had barely looked at me, staring instead at a fixed point somewhere to the right of my left elbow. I wondered how he could really think he knew anything about me.
“Trust me, you can find real purpose here.”
He looked me up and down like a prize cow. I swallowed my bristling pride.
“But it is time you go back to your room, Augustine,” and this time I felt an odd lightness at hearing my name in his voice. He was still frightening, but he seemed to be offering me something; I seemed to have pleased him.
“One more thing,” he said. “You will be allowed to receive visitors.”
“Thank you, but I do not think my parents can come up for at least a few months.”
“No, no,” he said, looking intently at the puddle of light on the glass of the table. “Other visitors. I think it will prove instructional to you.”
I said nothing, being nonplussed. Who would want to visit me in this place? “Do you mean other doctors?” I asked finally.
But he seemed to have truly forgotten me now, staring inward at something far more interesting. The attendant took my arm; I started, but the doctor seemed not to notice that either.
I turned to go.
“But you must remember,” he said as the attendant led me from the room, “that not everything can be learned at once.”
Chapter 23
Edouard
IN A DIM, recessed entryway only a few blocks away from where we had found the last body (which had turned out to be that of a M. Reventin, a mid-level banking executive with a wife and five children), was the naked body of a very young woman. She lay straight on her back on the hard cobblestones, her hands prayerful at her breasts, her legs soldier- straight, with the feet perfectly tilted together at the toes.
In the semi-darkness of my dark room I remembered how I had knelt in the damp. It was too familiar: The only difference was her nudity, which I had hastened to cover with the sheet I always carry in the event of such a need.
The girl had probably been a prostitute. The neighborhood was notoriously bad, worse even than Belleville. Of course, Mme. DuPrey had been murdered in the same neighborhood, but this girl was so young, and had been enticed or threatened into a doorway.
I was sure that pleasure, and only pleasure, had been the motive for this killing. There had been no reason, no sense to leaving her body displayed as it was. But I began to change my opinion as I developed her photographs and begin to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of this crime.
This girl had been dead so little time that I guessed her expression to be genuine: She had died both surprised and furious. There were numerous cuts to both her hands and her left arm; her right hand was unmarred, and I felt the sharp sting of tears to see a small knife lying some two feet to the right of the body. I had seen it at the scene, but I seldom let myself feel at the scene. Now I wanted to take my mind off the pain of watching that tiny knife swim into view, lying so pathetically on the cobblestones away from the body, so obviously too little, too late. She did not look older than eighteen; why was she out alone, with no one nearby to protect her? I knew this to be a sentimental question devoid of sense, but I found myself becoming angered nevertheless.
Had I eaten today? Normally I could hold myself at arm’s length or longer than that, if that was what it took to get the job done. But tonight I had no screen between myself and the suffering of others; I had no skin. Sometimes I became so immersed in my work that I actually forgot to eat, and I knew that such enthusiasm was not a credit to me but only youthful exuberance and the basics of an impractical nature made manifest. Maybe Capt. Bezier was right and I was a poet at heart: Only a poet would be so foolish as not to eat! But no, I had had at least a good breakfast and a substantial dinner today. My pain was the manifestation of a sensitivity I could no more change than I could the color of my eyes or hair. In any event, I wished, for the first time in my career, that I had chosen to aim only for success as a portrait photographer. But then I resolved to redouble my efforts to understand and help to solve the murder of the poor girl in front of me.
I gently released the other photographic papers from their glass plates even as I bathed the first in the solution I had mixed. I would add a toner, either of gold or selenium, after I was finished, in order to stabilize against fading. As my hands performed the familiar actions I wondered what this victim had been to her murderer. Capt. Bezier says that the identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer every time. This girl: What had she been to him? Because I was certain the murderer was male. My poor victim was not a small girl, she was big-boned and strong,
and she had been fighting for her life. All her cuts seemed to have been delivered by someone of more than average height; it is a pity that I have seen so many knife wounds working for Capt. Bezier that I can guess at the height of the murderer from the angle of the cuts.
Certainly her belongings had been stolen, but that did not necessitate stripping the body. Perhaps she had been violated, either in life or after, but that too was unlikely, given that the traffic in the area that time of night was not so sparse as to leave time for more than killing, then stripping and positioning the body.
I applied the toner and began cleaning up my workspace.
No time to do more than kill, strip, and position: So simply murdering a woman was not the motive. Violating a woman was not the motive. The last body I had photographed had been male, and not stripped, but still positioned in exactly the same way. So was that the motive? To position bodies? No; There was one thing more the two had had in common: Neither had been found with any identification. So the motive had been to position bodies that could not immediately be identified. It did not matter whether the victim was a man or a woman, only that he or she be taken off-guard. I was more than ever convinced the crime was committed by not one but two people. Yes, the victim was almost certainly a prostitute, so a man could easily approach and kill her, he did not need help with that, but the body would have had to be stripped quickly and effectively, more effectively, I imagined, than the man who had murdered her could do without assistance, as I was convinced he had probably been hurt by my poor victim’s little knife. Or perhaps I just hoped he had.
A woman. For the first victim, a woman to lure him, a man to kill him. For the second, a man to lure and kill, a woman to assist in the part that made no sense. Why position the bodies in such a way? And why remove all identification?
I took one last look at my lady’s face, snuffed the candle, and turned to leave the room. As I closed the door and made ready for bed, I thought I knew the answer to at least the second question. But it likely would make no difference what I knew or thought I knew. Capt. Bezier did listen to me sometimes. But this, I feared, would be impossible for a man like him to accept.
I knew I owed it to both victims; but I knew in my heart that it was the face of the girl that would prompt whatever effort I put forth with Capt. Bezier. As she had prompted all my musings here tonight, watching her pain come alive in the darkroom.
Two bodies positioned the same way. Stripped of identification, their logical destination would be the Paris Morgue. A museum of the dead, I had said to Capt. Bezier. Where the public was invited to view the bodies, as art is viewed in a museum. Who creates material for museums? Artists. Who would create material for the Paris Morgue? Artists of death.
As I lay sleepless, looking at the full moon out the window, I thought again: artists of death. I will not fail you, I thought, even as my thoughts began to drift. Life failed you many times, that much is clear, but I will not fail you.
Chapter 24
Charles
THE GIRL WAS a sensation at the Morgue. She hadn’t been beautiful in life, but she was beautiful in death. Naked, covered only in a white sheet. V and I had taken her clothing, and her cheap rings, and dropped them in the Seine, although my memory of that was vague, clouded by more than absinthe and adrenaline. I had not asked V if she had taken the knife, because I knew she thought I had; perhaps I had. My arm in its sling attracted no attention, because how could anyone know that she had cut her attacker? As I waited outside the Morgue it seemed as if my white sling were a shroud. Since I had killed the girl I had been unable to feel anything. I felt dead. Even V seemed only half-real, insubstantial as a remembered dream even as I held her in my arms.
I stood on line smelling the orange peel V was scraping delicately against her teeth, catching sugar on her tongue. I had drunk absinthe with my morning tea, and the air felt like wet flower petals against my skin. The smell of citrus was a golden halo around V’s head. She really didn’t seem to care about all the people on line, about what they were going to see. About what we were going to see. I could feel V’s heart beating; I could feel the girl’s blood sliding down my arm like flower petals. V’s blood pulsed slowly, like a ticking clock. When a little girl ran up to me and said, “What’s your name, Mister?” I shrieked. V put her hand on my arm, like the landing of a bird. The little girl’s mother came and pulled the child away, with many apologies.
The line moved forward with a lurch, and next I knew I was standing in front of the glass wall of her tomb. She reclined, her head against the back of a slanted board, covered in white. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. How had death made her so lovely? I became aware of all the activity in that vast arena; a moment ago that girl and I had been alone. In the dark, in the recess of a dirty doorway.
The crowd moved and pulsed around me like a single creature, voracious, unconscious. I saw that V was not looking at the dead girl at all. She was watching the crowd. The dead girl was nothing to her: The crowd was her creation. It was an animal that ate with its eyes and knew nothing, a creature whose appetite V whetted with death and watched now as it stuffed and sated itself on death. The women drew closer to their men, they took their arms. Their eyes glowed, and the men took advantage of their fear, which looked like lust, to put their arms around their waists, to touch their skin through silk or cotton. As I had touched Tabby’s sweet curve, even as I killed her.
My love watched with her cat’s eyes and Mona Lisa smile. I knew the kind of sex that we would have at home. But I was the one who had killed. Even V did not know that I had kissed this dead body. I took V’s hand; I looked at her lovely face. She was rapt, she had found her heaven. She smiled without really looking at me.
Seeing her pleasure took away everything—the blood, the thud of the dying body, the pain in my arm and shoulder. I hadn’t realized until that moment how afraid I had been of that girl and her knife and her desperate determination to live. Looking at her now I loved her a little: I had loved her a little while she was trying to stop me from killing her. V turned her smile full on me, and I realized that she knew, knew it all, everything I was thinking and had thought.
“Perhaps I should have let you have her,” she whispered to me now, rising on her toes to reach my ear. The crowd made a murmur like a cat’s growl at my back.
“No,” I said aloud. “I like it better this way.” The man next to me jostled my wounded arm as a way of getting me to move. I didn’t want to say good-bye to Tabby; it was like leaving a lover. V knew I’d lied, and she liked that, although I didn’t know why.
“We have seen enough,” she said, and we moved on into the rippling fur of the crowd.
Chapter 25
From the Journal of Augustine Dechelette
APPARENTLY ONE CAN find at least the semblance of normalcy under almost any circumstances, provided a predictable routine is established. I wake in the morning aware that I am in Paris; and then the dreary knowledge of how far I am from the reality of my dreams sets in, sudden and heavy, and for a moment I am incapacitated by grief and cannot move. But every morning a pair of mourning doves croons outside my window, and each time their crooning soothes me, and I am myself again. I am in Paris, and although it is not the Paris I imagined, my life is neither truly difficult nor even too dull. I am, after all, one of the hysterics the great Dr. Charcot has chosen to be, perhaps, a regular performer on a stage of which I know both more and less than I would like. Surely I am not to be trotted out, over and over, on the stage of the Amphitheatre as though I were a new patient each time. But I have been given a journal; I have been given ink. Rewards for a future of good behavior, I know that. And I know that Dr. Charcot favors some patients over others.
Oh, I am incorrigible! To even hope to be favored! What would Maman think? But dear Maman is not here, and even if she were she could not comprehend what my life is now, nor what it is doing to me: A subtle shift an
d change is occurring even now in my character, in my heart and my soul, and I do not yet know where it will lead. But I am, for better or worse, full of anticipation. I long to find out what this new life will bring.
They make you endure a great deal here in the interest of getting well. I know I ought not complain, but, oh, it is difficult to be grateful! I am suffering from green disease. I wish I could convince the great doctor that all I am suffering from is being in love. All! Does Louis even know where I am? It is doubtful, for what family would advertise their daughter’s being taken to the madhouse? And so Louis must think that I just left, without a good-bye. For him it is over already, and I am trapped here knowing that. Knowing that he leaves his shop each night and goes home to his fat wife and thinks of me, I know, less and less. Because my candle always burned more brightly than his. Always. I did not know it then. I know it now.
Did Louis ever love me? Perhaps I was just one more girl awestruck by his accomplishments, his erudition, his delicate hands and poet’s eyes. Perhaps I was the girl he will long for forever. I can believe anything, since I cannot know.
But there is little here to keep my mind on the present. I should like hard work now, to be waking early to milk and care for the cows, to be maintaining the vegetable garden with my mother in the afternoons after my mending, to be cleaning out the chicken coop. I would like to work my body to exhaustion, that my mind might do its healing while I was thus occupied.
But I have been told that such a sickness as I have is best treated with rest. Rest for the body as well as the mind. I am left a long time in my room. And oh, irony of ironies, the very vice the discovery of which sent me to this place, that very evil sometimes comes to torment me where I lay healing in my bed. It is as if my body, with its own wisdom, feels that self-pollution is a valid, in fact, the valid means of dispersing the humors that combine to cause my sleeplessness and despair. And oh, that no one ever sees this journal! For I have given in to this impulse more than once, and to my everlasting shame have found it to be of more help than all the hydrobaths in Paris.
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