UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

by Eco, Umberto

  While the writers and artists had always sat together at long tables, the men of science dined alone, as I did. But after sitting at neighboring tables on several occasions, I became familiar with a few medical men. My first acquaintance was Doctor Du Maurier, a man so loathsome that I wondered how a psychiatrist (which he was) could inspire the trust of his patients with such an unpleasant face. It was the pale, envious face of one who thinks he is destined always to remain in second place. He was, in fact, the director of a small clinic for nervous illnesses at Vincennes, but knew full well that his institute would never enjoy the fame and prosperity of the clinic run by the more renowned Doctor Blanche — though Du Maurier used to mutter sarcastically that one of Blanche's patients thirty years before had been a certain Nerval (according to him, a poet of some merit) who had been driven to suicide after being treated at his famous clinic.

  Another two table companions with whom I became familiar were Doctors Bourru and Burot, unusual fellows who looked like twin brothers, both dressed in black with almost the same cut of coat, the same long black mustaches and clean-shaven chins, with collars slightly grubby, inevitably, as they were in Paris as travelers, since they practiced at the École de Médecine at Rochefort and came to the capital for only a few days each month to follow Charcot's experiments.

  "What, no leeks today?" Bourru asked one day, irritated. And Burot, scandalized: "No leeks?"

  While the waiter apologized, I interposed from the next table: "But they have excellent wild salsify. I prefer it to leeks." Then, with a smile, I softly sang: "Tous les légumes, / au clair de lune, / étaient en train de s'amuser / et les passants les regardaient. / Les cornichons / dansaient en rond, / les salsifis / dansaient sans bruit . . ."

  Persuaded, the two table companions chose salsifis. And from there began a cordial acquaintance, on two days each month.

  "You see, Monsieur Simonini," Bourru explained, "Doctor Charcot is studying hysteria, a form of neurosis that manifests itself in various psychomotor, sensory and vegetative symptoms. In the past it was regarded as an exclusively female phenomenon caused by disturbances in uterine function, but Charcot has formed the view that hysterical manifestations are to be found equally in both sexes, and may include paralysis, epilepsy, blindness or deafness, and difficulties in breathing, speaking or swallowing."

  "My colleague," Burot interrupted, "has not yet mentioned that Charcot claims to have developed a treatment that alleviates the symptoms."

  "I was just about to get there," responded Bourru, exasperated. "Charcot has chosen the path of hypnotism, which until recently was an occupation for charlatans like Mesmer. Under hypnosis, patients ought to be able to recall traumatic episodes, which are the origin of the hysteria, and be cured through awareness of them."

  "And are they cured?"

  "That is the point, Monsieur Simonini," said Bourru. "For us, what goes on at the Salpêtrière often feels more like the theater than clinical psychiatry. Let us be clear: we wouldn't want to dispute the infallible diagnostic abilities of the master . . ."

  "Not to question them at all," confirmed Burot. "It's the technique of hypnotism itself that . . ."

  Bourru and Burot told me about the various systems for hypnotizing, from the quackish methods of a certain Abbé Faria (my ears pricked up at that Dumasian name, though it is well known that Dumas plundered real stories) to the scientific approach of Doctor Braid, a true pioneer.

  "The best magnetizers," said Burot, "now follow procedures that are much simpler."

  "And more effective," added Bourru. "A medallion or a key is waved before the patient, who is told to watch it closely. Within one to three minutes the subject's pupils develop an oscillatory movement, the pulse slows down, the eyes close, the face relaxes, and drowsiness may last for up to twenty minutes."

  "It has to be said," Burot observed, "that much depends on the subject, since magnetization does not depend upon the transmission of mysterious fluids, as that buffoon Mesmer suggested, but upon phenomena of autosuggestion. Indian gurus obtain the same result by focusing on the point of their nose, the monks of Mount Athos by staring at their navel.

  * * *

  "In the past it was regarded as an exclusively female phenomenon caused by disturbances in uterine function."

  * * *

  "We do not much believe in these forms of autosuggestion," Burot added, "though we ourselves are only putting into practice ideas developed by Charcot himself, before he began to place so much trust in hypnotism. We are dealing with cases of personality variation, in other words, with patients who think they are one person one day and someone else another, and the two personalities know nothing of each other. Last year a certain Louis came to our hospital."

  "An interesting case," said Bourru. "He complained of paralysis, anesthesia, contractions, muscular spasms, hyperesthesia, skin irritation, hemorrhaging, coughing, vomiting, epileptic fits, catatonia, sleepwalking, Saint Vitus' dance, speech impediments . . ."

  "Sometimes he thought he was a dog," said Burot, "or a steam locomotive. And then he had persecutory delusions, restricted vision, gustatory, olfactory and visual hallucinations, pseudo-tubercular pulmonary congestion, headache, stomachache, constipation, anorexia, bulimia, lethargy, kleptomania . . ."

  "In short," Bourru said, "a normal picture. But instead of resorting to hypnosis, we applied a steel bar to the patient's right arm, and there, as if by magic, he appeared before us like a new man. Paralysis and insensitivity had disappeared from the right side and had moved to the left."

  "In front of us was another person," continued Burot, "who remembered nothing of what had happened a moment earlier. Louis, in one of his states, was teetotal; in the other he had a tendency to drunkenness."

  "Note," said Bourru, "that the magnetic force of a substance acts even from a distance. For example, a small bottle containing an alcoholic substance is placed under the subject's chair without his knowledge. In this state of somnambulism the subject will display all the symptoms of drunkenness."

  "You understand that our practices respect the mental integrity of the patient," concluded Burot. "Hypnotism makes the subject lose consciousness, whereas with magnetism there is no violent impact upon an organ but a progressive charging of the nervous plexus."

  From that conversation I formed the view that Bourru and Burot were two imbeciles who tormented poor lunatics with injurious substances, and I felt confirmed in my opinion when I saw Doctor Du Maurier, who was following the conversation from a nearby table, shaking his head several times.

  "My dear friend," he said to me two days later, "Charcot and our two from Rochefort, instead of analyzing the past history of their patients and asking themselves what it means to have two states of consciousness, spend their time worrying about whether it's better to work on them with hypnosis or with metal bars. The problem is that in many patients the passage from one personality to another occurs spontaneously, without our being able to predict how and when. We might talk of self-hypnosis. In my view Charcot and his disciples have not given sufficient consideration to the experiences of Doctor Azam and the Félida case. We know very little about these phenomena. Memory disturbance may be caused by a reduction in blood flow to a still unknown part of the brain, and the momentary constriction of the vessels could be provoked by a state of hysteria. But where in the brain is the lack of blood flow that causes memory loss?"

  "Where?"

  "That is the point. You know that our brain has two hemispheres. There may be people who think sometimes with a complete hemisphere and sometimes with one that is incomplete, in which the memory faculty is missing. In my clinic I have found a very similar case to that of Félida. A young woman a little over twenty called Diana."

  Du Maurier stopped for a moment, as if anxious about revealing a confidential matter.

  "A relative left her with me for treatment two years ago, and then died. The payments obviously stopped, but what could I do, turn the patient out onto the street? I know little
of her past. It seems, according to what she has told me, that during her adolescence, every five or six days she would feel pain in her temples after some excitement, and then collapse as if asleep. What she calls sleep is, in fact, an attack of hysteria; when she wakes up, or calms down, she is quite different from what she was before. In other words, she has entered what Doctor Azam described as the second state. In the state that we shall call normal, Diana behaves as the disciple of a Masonic sect . . . Don't misunderstand me, I too belong to the Grand Orient, by which I mean the Freemasonry of respectable people, but perhaps you know that there exist various 'obediences' in the Templar tradition with peculiar propensities for the occult sciences, and some of them — which are, fortunately, very much on the fringe — incline toward satanic rites. In what must, alas, be defined as her normal state, Diana considers herself to be a disciple of Lucifer or something of that kind. She makes licentious remarks, talks about lewd incidents, tries to seduce members of the male nursing staffand even me. I am sorry to be so indelicate, especially as Diana is, one might say, a charming woman. In my view, in this state she suffers the effects of traumas inflicted upon her during her adolescence, and tries to escape those memories by entering periodically into her second state. In this state Diana appears as a mild, innocent creature; she is a good Christian, asks for her prayer book and to be allowed to go to Mass. But the strange aspect, which also happened with Félida, is that Diana, in her second state, when she is the virtuous Diana, clearly remembers how she was in her normal state, and is distressed, and asks how she could have been so bad, and punishes herself with a hair shirt, to such a point that she calls the second state her rational state, and refers to her normal state as a period when she was prey to hallucinations. In her normal state, however, Diana remembers nothing of what she does in her second state. The two conditions alternate at unpredictable intervals, and sometimes she remains in one or the other state for several days. I would agree with Doctor Azam when it comes to perfect somnambulism. It is not just somnambulists, in fact, but also those who take drugs — hashish, belladonna, opium — or abuse alcohol, who do things they cannot remember when they wake up again."

  * * *

  "Charcot has chosen the path of hypnotism, which until recently was an occupation for charlatans like Mesmer."

  * * *

  I don't know why the account of Diana's illness intrigued me so much, but I remember saying to Du Maurier: "I will mention it to an acquaintance of mine who deals with sad cases such as this, and knows where an orphan girl might be best looked after. I will send Abbé Dalla Piccola to you; he has much influence among charitable institutions."

  At least I knew the name Dalla Piccola when I spoke with Du Maurier. But why was I so concerned about this woman Diana?

  I have been writing for hours, my thumb is aching, and I have eaten at my desk, spreading pâté and butter on bread, with a few glasses of Château Latour to stimulate the memory.

  I would have liked to reward myself with, I don't know, perhaps a visit to Brébant-Vachette, but until I have understood who I am, I can't be seen around. Sooner or later, though, I'll have to venture into place Maubert to bring back something else to eat.

  Let us think no more about it for the moment, and return to our writing.

  During those years (I think it was '85 or '86) I became acquainted with that man at Magny whom I still call the Austrian (or German) doctor. His name now comes back to me — he was called Froïde (I think that's how it's written), a doctor around thirty years old who most certainly came to Magny only because he couldn't afford better, and was doing an apprenticeship with Charcot. He sat alone at a nearby table, and at first we limited ourselves to polite nods. I judged him to be gloomy by nature, ill at ease, timidly eager for someone to confide in, to unburden his anxieties. On two or three occasions he had found a pretext for exchanging a few words, but I had always remained aloof.

  Even though the name Froïde did not have the same ring as Steiner or Rosenberg, I nevertheless knew that all Jews who live and make money in Paris have German names, and, my suspicions having been raised by his hooked nose, one day I asked Du Maurier, who made a vague gesture, adding, "I'm not sure, but in any event I prefer to keep my distance — Jew and German are a mix I don't much like."

  "Is he not Austrian?" I asked.

  "It's the same, is it not? Same language, same way of thinking. I haven't forgotten the Prussians who marched along the ChampsÉlysées."

  "I am told that medicine is among the professions most often followed by Jews, as much as usury. It's a good thing never to be in need of money, and never to fall ill."

  "But there are Christian doctors too," Du Maurier replied with an icy smile.

  I had made a faux pas.

  There are Paris intellectuals who, before expressing their distaste for Jews, concede that some of their best friends are Jews. Hypocrisy. I have no Jewish friends (God forbid). All my life I've avoided Jews. Perhaps I have instinctively avoided them, because the Jew (like the German) can be identified by his smell (as Victor Hugo put it, fetor judaica). This and other signs help them to recognize each other, as pederasts do. My grandfather used to say that their smell is due to the excessive use of garlic and onion, and perhaps mutton and goose, coated with sticky sugars that make them splenetic. But it must also be the race itself — their infected blood, their feeble loins. They are all communists — look at Marx and Lassalle. In this respect, my Jesuits were right for once.

  I've also managed to avoid Jews because I keep an eye on names. Austrian Jews, as they grew rich, bought fancy names, of flowers, precious stones or noble metals, becoming Silbermann or Goldstein. The poorer ones acquired names such as Grünspan (verdigris). In France and Italy, they disguised themselves by adopting the names of cities or places such as Ravenna, Modena, Picard and Flamand, or they were inspired by the revolutionary calendar (Froment, Avoine, Laurier)—quite rightly, seeing that their fathers had been the hidden authors of the regicide. But you also have to be careful about first names, which sometimes conceal Jewish names — Maurice comes from Moses, Isidore from Isaac, Édouard from Aaron, Jacques from Jacob and Alphonse from Adam.

  Is Sigmund a Jewish name? Instinctively I had decided to keep a distance from the mountebank, but one day Froïde knocked over the saltcellar as he went to pick it up. Certain rules of courtesy have to be respected between neighboring tables, and I offered him mine, observing that in some countries knocking over the salt was considered bad luck, and he laughed, saying that he was not superstitious. From that day on we began to exchange a few words. He apologized for his French, which he described as patchy, but which was easy to understand. They are nomadic by habit and have to cope with all languages. I said politely, "It's just a matter of getting used to the sound," and he smiled at me with gratitude. Slimy.

  As a Jew Froïde was also deceitful. I had always heard it said that those of his race must eat only special food, cooked in a particular way, and for this reason they always live in ghettos, whereas Froïde tucked into all that Magny had to offer, and was not averse to a glass of beer with his meal.

  One evening it seemed he wanted to let himself go. He had already ordered two beers and, after dessert, while he was smoking nervously, he asked for a third. And then, as he was talking and waving his hands, he knocked the salt over for the second time.

  "It's not that I'm clumsy," he apologized, "but I am rather anxious. It's been three days since I last received a letter from my fiancée. I don't expect her to write as I do, almost every day, but this silence worries me. She is in delicate health; it upsets me terribly not to be with her. And I need her approval for whatever I do. I would like to hear what she thinks about my dinner with Charcot. Because you know, Monsieur Simonini, I was invited to dinner at the great man's house a few evenings ago. It doesn't happen to every young visiting doctor, and a foreigner at that."

  There, I thought, the little Semite parvenu, working his way into respectable families to advance in his ca
reer. And did his concern about his fiancée not betray the sensual and lascivious nature of the Jew, always thinking about sex? You think about her at night, don't you? And maybe you touch yourself fantasizing about her — you too should read Tissot. But I let him go on.

  "The guests were men of quality: Daudet's son, Doctor Strauss, Pasteur's assistant, Professor Beck from the Institute and the great Italian painter Emilio Toffano. An evening that cost me fourteen francs — a fine black Hamburg cravat, white gloves, a new shirt and a dress coat for the first time in my life. And for the first time in my life I had my beard trimmed, in the French style. As for my shyness, a little cocaine helps to loosen the tongue."

  "Cocaine? Is it not a poison?"

  "Everything is poisonous if taken in excessive doses, even wine. But I have been studying this remarkable substance for two years. Cocaine, you see, is an alkaloid taken from a plant that is chewed by the natives of South America to resist the Andean altitudes. Unlike opium and alcohol, it provokes mental states of excitement without producing negative effects. It is excellent for relieving pain, principally in ophthalmology, or for the cure of asthma, useful in treating alcoholism and drug addiction, perfect against seasickness and valuable in treating diabetes; it suppresses hunger, drowsiness and fatigue like magic, is a good substitute for tobacco, cures dyspepsia, flatulence, liver attacks, stomach cramps, hypochondria, spinal irritation, hay fever, is a valuable restorative in consumption and cures migraine; in cases of serious tooth decay, insert a wad of cotton soaked in a four percent solution into the cavity and the pain subsides immediately. And above all it is marvelous for depressives — in restoring their confidence, raising their spirits, making them more active and optimistic."