Paris Requiem

by Lisa Appignanesi

  James stepped back into the cubicle. ‘Is Dr Vaillant here today, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘He’s lecturing now,’ she replied curtly. ‘He can’t be disturbed.’

  ‘We need to see Vaillant,’ James said to Raf as they walked quickly down the corridor.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We need to check him out.’

  ‘There’s nothing in it. Judith is just … well, just mad. It’s quite obvious. Patients die. Or they’re moved to other wards. They vanish. And because she’s the way she is, she imagines they’re being killed. Poor woman. But we’re wasting our time. Arnhem as good as said it.’

  ‘I’d still like to meet Vaillant,’ James said stubbornly. ‘Get a sense of the place. Why is it just the Jews that die?’

  ‘We don’t know that. We don’t know who those people she named are. She happens to be sensitive to their race. I guess we’d be too, if we had her past.’

  A sudden hubbub in the corridor stopped them speaking. Two patients were being wheeled past on trolleys. A slew of what looked like medical students followed them.

  ‘When I was here the other day, Comte spun a theory for me, about Jews being disproportionately susceptible to nervous illness,’ James said in a low voice when the commotion had passed.

  ‘That could well be. Or it could be more spin-off from the Dreyfus case. If you went to as many mad patriotic meetings as I do, you’d be amazed at the garbage these pundits come up with. I’m not surprised it affects someone like Judith. But that doesn’t make the man a killer. And it’s Olympe we have to concentrate on.’

  James paused.

  ‘Did you notice how much Judith looks like Olympe?’

  ‘You’re going mad, too, Jim. This place is getting to you. Getting to me, too. We’ve got to get out of here.’ Raf quickened his pace.

  ‘You mean you didn’t see it.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t see it. You’re raving.’

  They had reached the entry hall and James hesitated. ‘I’m going to find out if I can get into Vaillant’s lecture.’

  Raf shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I’ve got other irons in the fire. I want to chase Arnhem on this Bernfeld man. And I’ll stop off on the way to have a chat with Poupette, see if she’s picked up any interesting news on the streets. Then, there’s another rally tonight. Fancy it?’

  ‘No, that’s your domain.’

  ‘It’ll teach you something about the mad ideas that float around these days.’ He paused, his eyes filling with troubled passion. ‘The only difference is that outside this place they’re given serious consideration and played out in the political arena.’

  James slipped through a creaking door and found himself at the top of a medium-sized amphitheatre. The room was about three-quarters full. He tiptoed to the nearest seat, close to the end of a row. All eyes were to the front where a man stood in front of a life-size diagram of what looked like a spinal column, though there were feet in various contorted positions placed around it. The man himself was tall, slender, and of military bearing. He had a strong, handsome face which ended in a well-clipped point of a beard. His voice was stentorian. Dr Vaillant, James quickly decided, was a prepossessing figure.

  To his side on a narrow bed, a small, grizzled man lay huddled. Another man, wrapped in what looked like a caftan, sat listlessly in a wheelchair. Oddly there was a violin poised on his lap. Two assistants hovered about them.

  ‘In conclusion, Messieurs,’ Vaillant was saying, ‘let me recapitulate a little of the material we have investigated in these last two presentations. The wandering Jews we have had occasion to examine in our midst bear witness to the positive and negative aspects of that great legend. Ahasverus suffered from the imperative to ‘Go on. Go on.’ An unquiet instinct, an eternal restlessness forced him to wander the globe. More than any other people, the Jews amongst us are subject to this law of fluctuation whose manifestations are unpredictable. It can engender first-rate scientific and artistic aptitude; it can also produce mental aberrances. The two are not, I contend, unrelated and in Jews we find a general predisposition to hereditary neurologic disorders of all sorts – from ataxic tabes to neuropathologic chorea to hysteria – not to mention the American disease, neurasthenia.’

  James balked and sat up straighter on the hard wood of the bench.

  ‘Here at the Salpêtrière, our significant number of Jews present us with a unique opportunity to investigate a hereditary pool – not only through our inmates, but their relations. Vagabondage – as we have seen it in the ‘filles des rues’, those streetwalkers who poison our menfolk and in those male patients who have travelled the breadth of Europe and sometimes gone as far afield as America and back, undoubtedly spreading their degenerate spawn on the way – is a specific hereditary condition characterised by an incessant need to wander from one home or homeland to another. Such people are never satisfied. Whether they have found a fortune, or a cure for their ills, their pathology means that they must needs go on, always in search of an elsewhere or a something else. On the way they develop a host of complaints, the American illness being only one of them. It remains for our science now to designate in our laboratories the anatomical source of the clinical picture such patients present.

  ‘One day, Messieurs, I am convinced of it, one day we will discover a fingerprint of the moral history of a man or woman written into the coils and loops of that most fascinating of organs, the brain. I thank you, Messieurs. Ah oui, and Madame.’ Vaillant bowed to a woman on his left with a smile which held the trace of a sneer.

  James sat stonily in his seat only moving when people further down the row forced him to. His mind was racing. He felt implicated in Vaillant’s analysis – that bizarre yoking of Americans and Jews. It made him revolt viscerally against the doctor’s argument. Reluctant traveller though he might himself be, he couldn’t see anything generically wrong with movement. Americans wandered to arrive in America; they moved again for land, or work, or gold, or simply for the excitement of it all. Vaillant’s notion that this constituted an illness was preposterous. Could this altogether sensible-looking doctor really be suggesting that James’s own forebears had left England and Ireland because of some pathological predisposition to wander, rather than because of famine or intolerance? Was he intimating that the entire American continent was the result of some aberrant neurological condition? And if the basis of his argument about the one was incorrect, how could he be correct about the other, the Jews?

  Raf was right. Mad ideas were afloat. Perhaps, James thought with a distinct sense of transgression, that very note he had so often heard struck in these last days – the note of hereditary transmission – was itself part of the madness.

  At the same time, it was undeniable that Judith and the women he had seen in her ward were ill. Ellie was ill, too. The American illness.

  His thoughts buzzing like angry wasps, he found himself in a mill of students. One of them was addressing him. ‘Intéressant, non?’

  Yes, James nodded. Vaillant was interesting. But … Suddenly he heard himself ask where the laboratories might be found.

  The friendly student pointed downwards, then scrutinised him. ‘Are you a student here?’

  James shook his head. ‘Just a visitor. But I would love to see the laboratories. At Harvard College we have nothing quite like this.’

  ‘Harvard? In America?’

  James nodded and the student grinned. ‘How did you like what Vaillant said?’

  ‘I can’t say I was wholly convinced.’

  The grin spread. ‘Professeur Vaillant was once married to an American woman. She left him. She wandered. It explains a little, non?’

  James wanted to ask if he had also been married to a Jewess, but found himself asking instead, ‘Are you by any chance going down to the laboratories?’

  ‘No. It’s my time for the wards. But, wait a minute … There’s our star pathologist.’ He hailed a lanky man with a dour face and eyebrows so thick they all but formed a line across his
brow. ‘Are you going down to the lab, Steinlen?’

  Steinlen gave a curt nod.

  ‘Could you take Monsieur …’

  ‘Norton,’ James supplied.

  ‘Monsieur Norton from Harvard down with you?’

  Steinlen appraised him with decided suspicion. ‘It’s not open to visitors. Vaillant wouldn’t be pleased.’

  ‘I just want to have a quick look, but no matter. I’ll get Dr Vaillant’s permission. We have friends in common.’

  ‘Oh go on, take him,’ the first student protested. ‘None of the profs will be there now. And he’s had to sit through Vaillant’s asides on the American illness.’

  ‘Vaillant’s right,’ the tall man said. ‘The American doctors are in agreement. It’s the hectic pace of American life.’

  ‘Then we must have a great deal in common, Monsieur. I must say that I find Paris rather more hectic than Boston.’

  ‘Ah but you see, you have chosen to come here. Many of your compatriots come here. We stay at home.’

  ‘Go on, take him, Steinlen. You can show off your newest cadaver to Mr Norton.’

  ‘Is it a Jew?’ James heard himself ask.

  The dour face turned on him with a slight smirk. ‘An old one. From Odessa. An excellent specimen. Come along then. He has wonderfully splayed feet, with high arches and hammer toes. A tabetic.’ The man went on, suddenly garrulous, drowning James in science.

  James nodded without listening. The thoughts that crowded his mind were having an effect on his pulse. What if Judith were right? What if Vaillant was discreetly picking off patients in order to give a laboratory base to his theories? Whatever Raf contended, Olympe and her sister were remarkably alike. Might Vaillant have in some deranged way wanted to investigate a familial disease pattern? There might be case notes somewhere in the hospital about a wandering Rachel.

  No, he was raving. It was the influence of this place with its bleak corridors, its howling, confined lunatics. Even the courtyards, like the one they now crossed, were bleak, infested with scurrying shadows. And his speculations made no sense. Olympe’s body had been found in the river. She hadn’t disappeared into a laboratory.

  Something else occurred to him. What if Judith had held forth her delirious speculations to Olympe? And the brave girl – he knew she was brave, everything in her life testified to it – had decided to investigate. As he was doing now. Had enmeshed herself in the whole venomous business and Vaillant had somehow got wind of a determination she might have formed to expose him. Expose his killing of patients. Jewish patients. What simpler solution to that threat than to plunge her into the waters of the Seine. No one would suspect him. No one from Olympe’s world apart from Marguerite would even know of Judith’s existence. And she couldn’t tell Raf or her kinship with Judith would have to come out.

  Did Marguerite know Vaillant? He would have to ask.

  The only problem with his racing conjectures was that Vaillant didn’t look like a killer. On the other hand the man beside him, the devoted student, had distinct possibilities in that direction. Or the bullying and fleshy Dr Comte. Yes, decidedly Dr Comte.

  ‘Tell me,’ James interrupted Steinlen’s monologue. ‘Do you ever have opportunity in the lab to investigate several members of one family.’

  ‘Ah, there you have us, Monsieur. We have records, of course, of hereditary transmission – for Friedreich’s disease and Thompson’s disease; many instances of depressed and demented parents producing ataxic children and so on. But to my knowledge, certainly during my time in the Salpêtrière we have only had one possibility of investigating the brain and internal deformations of a single family. That was a father and daughter.’

  ‘Were they Jews?’

  ‘Fortunately.’ The man nodded, seemed about to give James his own cadaverous smile, when his face suddenly darkened. ‘Have you heard that the government fell today?’

  ‘No. I hadn’t.’

  ‘That, too, can be laid at the Jews’ feet. Their financiers have influenced everyone. Loubet is in their pocket. There are several rallies tonight. You must come and swell our numbers. If we don’t make our dissatisfaction heard, we are certain to have a government that wants nothing more than to re-instate Dreyfus and further weaken the Republic. The medical faculty, I can tell you, is staunchly patriotic.’

  ‘Indeed,’ James murmured.

  They had reached a far corner of a second courtyard and Steinlen unlocked a door, only to lock it quickly behind them.

  An acrid chemical reek assaulted James’s nostrils, invaded his eyes, produced tears which blurred his vision. He looked through their mist to see a rectangular room, a series of pallets at its centre. On one of them lay a corpse, obscenely naked, the skin tinged greyish green. It was a man, an old man, his belly protruding slightly, his legs thin, misshapen, his hands clenched at his side as if he were struggling against some insurmountable pain. The bristle on his jutting chin seemed strangely alive, each hair a manifest spike clutching onto life.

  James gripped the table and averted his eyes. They fell on walls lined with jars. Brains of varying sizes floated inside them, like so many shrunken footballs. There were other parts, too, tangled tufts of fibres that he couldn’t or wouldn’t recognise. On the side tables lay a variety of instruments, scalpels and mallets and callipers and saws and heavy scissors, alongside scales, an assortment of bone parts, as well as what looked like vertebrae.

  Suddenly the room started to swirl in an ever more frenzied motion, the body, the jars, the instruments trapped in an unending circle of movement, gathering up everything in its wake, Maisie and Olympe and Judith and the women in the ward, round and round. A growing whirlpool of recurrence. And it was cold, so very cold, an arctic chill which ate away at skin and bone, preventing escape.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there, frozen in time, the whirlpool all around him, but gradually Steinlen’s voice penetrated his daze. The voice waxed enthusiastic and as James at last focused on his face, he had the odd sense that this chamber of death and dismemberment was the man’s preferred home.

  He forced himself to listen to his words. Steinlen was describing what he was about to do to the cadaver, what lesions and irregular growths he expected to find, along with a calcification of the joints. But it was the brain that most interested him. The brain was undiscovered country, a mysterious region calling out to the adventurous scientist. He was certain that in this man he would find a shrunken left hemisphere. The left hemisphere was the material home of the higher, the rational qualities. It was always deficient in women and in the débile, the mentally defective.

  Steinlen pointed and jabbed as he went and James had the dawning realisation that he saw these sad remains of a man as a rich terrain waiting to be charted by his mapping skills. He took a deep, painful breath and reminding himself why he was here, asked with a telltale tremor, ‘How many bodies do you get to work on?’

  ‘Quite a few. The Salpêtrière houses the population of a small town.’

  ‘Any young ones?’

  ‘You mean children?’

  ‘No, no, young people.’

  ‘Of course. In a hospital like this death is democratic.’ Steinlen grinned, exhibiting a row of strong yellow teeth.

  ‘And Dr Vaillant leads you in your researches. He comes here himself?’

  ‘Oh yes. Often enough. He’s a skilful dissector.’

  James nodded respectfully. ‘And Dr Comte as well.

  ‘He’s better on the clinical side – but he provides us with a good number of our bodies.’

  James’s skin prickled, as if a scalpel had demarcated the circle of his heart. ‘Do you get an even number of men and women?’ he asked with a hesitant stammer.

  ‘More women of late.’

  ‘You keep records and charts, I suppose?’

  Steinlen’s lip curled in marked contempt. ‘We are scientists, Monsieur. Of course we keep records.’ He waved his arm towards a far corner of the room where James saw a closed
door. ‘But I have no authority …’

  ‘Of course not, of course not.’ James cut him off with a smile. ‘I was only asking for future reference, in case any of our students wished to spend a few months at your great hospital.’

  Steinlen seemed about to question him further, but James forestalled him with a hasty look at his watch. ‘I must leave you now, Monsieur. It’s later than I thought. My sincerest thanks.’

  Relief bounded through him as he closed the door of that chamber of death behind him. He didn’t enjoy it for long. He had taken only a few steps into the courtyard, when Dr Comte’s oily figure bounded into his view. A wish for invisibility did no good. The doctor was already addressing him.

  ‘I see you are developing a great affection for our hospital, Monsieur Norton. Still here after so many hours?’

  ‘I took the opportunity of attending Dr Vaillant’s lecture.’

  ‘And visiting our laboratory?’ The man eyed him with unpleasant suspicion and blocked his path.

  ‘Most impressive,’ James said evenly, edging round him. Then he stopped. ‘Tell me, Doctor, it’s something that interests me. Have you come across many cases of ambulatory automatism?’

  Comte lifted a single shaggy eyebrow. ‘Only one, directly. You’ll have to go to the men’s wards for that.’ His chuckle held a malign edge. ‘Women, unless they take to the streets like your cousin Mademoiselle Boussel, tend to do their wandering in their dreams.’

  ‘Is that so? Good evening, Doctor. Do take good care of Judith for us – and of dear Louise.’

  ‘We take good care of all our patients, Monsieur,’ the man called after him. ‘Every single one.’

  James didn’t like his tone. He didn’t like his tone at all. In fact there was nothing he liked about this place. He had a sudden vision of smuggling Judith out of its insalubrious confines – a Judith with her hair neatly coiffed, her dress a rustling silk, her fine eyes outlined with kohl. A Judith in effect who was a reincarnation of a lost Olympe. The vision followed him all the way back to his hotel.