Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  ‘And what of Madame Roeg?’ I asked as casually as I could muster.

  ‘We have heard nothing. Disappeared for good I think. For all I know she simply abandoned her life and went wandering.’ Artopoulos looked reflective. ‘It happens from time to time. Someone will set off one day, and never come back. I’ve heard of some nomadic cultures whose religions revolve around this kind of peregrination. The alienists call it ambulatory automatism.’

  He turned his attention back to his lobster. I watched this curious man in the act of eating. He ate quickly, packing his mouth with food and then chewing like a rabbit. I, on the other hand, had lost my appetite altogether. Noticing this, Artopoulos stopped eating and looked up at me with his mouth open, his fully laden fork hovering near its entrance. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked, putting down the fork. Again, I felt the intensity of his gaze.

  ‘Pardon my ignorance, but what is an alienist?’ I asked, deflecting the conversation to a safer subject.

  Artopoulos was visibly surprised. He lifted his eyebrows so that they formed two perfect circumflexes. ‘Damnation, man, where have you been for the past twenty years?’ I noticed there was a little morsel of lobster flesh spiked in his moustache.

  ‘Forgive me.’ An alibi sprang unbidden to my mouth – the inherited talents of the born liar. ‘My education consists of four years at a seminary in Rome.’

  The eyebrows rose higher still into the middle of his forehead. ‘How extraordinary. And what finally drove you from the seminary?’

  ‘A crisis of faith.’

  He laughed. ‘How charming! And pray tell, what was the nature of this crisis of faith?’

  ‘I began to question the catechism. I began to doubt the existence of the soul.’

  He studied me with narrowed eyes for a moment before resuming his feast. ‘Well, dear boy, it sounds like you would make a wonderful alienist yourself. But I can assure you I have no such doubts.’

  ‘Is that so? You believe you have a soul that will go to heaven, or hell, depending on your actions in this lifetime?’

  ‘I didn’t say I believe in an afterlife. I believe in the existence of the soul, which is quite a different matter.’

  ‘What makes you so certain that there is such a thing, if there is no afterlife?’

  Once again, Artopoulos scrutinised me. He seemed to come to a decision. ‘Dear boy, I think we are going to be the best of friends.’ He gestured to a waiter to fill our glasses. When they were full, he took another sip, sloshing the wine in his mouth. Once he’d swallowed he resumed his speech – for even when one was alone with Artopoulos, he spoke mostly in speeches, each one delivered as if to a vast assembly. ‘There is no more exciting field in all the sciences than that of alienism. The alienists proclaim that society stands finally on the threshold of unravelling man’s deepest mysteries. In the future, they say, there will be no suffering. There will be remedies for our moral torments as efficacious as those for our physical afflictions.’ He shovelled another forkful into his cavernous mouth, chewed, rabbit-like, several times, swallowed and took up the thread once more. ‘I, for one, am not so convinced. If we have no soul, we are little better than animals. I am no different from this lobster here, for example,’ he said, pointing towards the crustacean’s mutilated carcass. ‘But which of us is devouring the other?’ He half-smiled. ‘The simple fact that I am eating this lobster, in this restaurant, in this city, is proof enough for me that there is no moral equivalence between us. I have a soul, and as long as I am alive it is eternal. You really do drink far too slowly. We shall have to remedy that.’

  Before I could stop him he’d taken my glass and filled it. On that afternoon, as forever after, Artopoulos was one of the most entertaining men I’d ever known, and not without a certain guile. He asked me about my family, provenance, education, station and knowledge of poetry. The picture I painted for him in reply was that of a young man of inherited means, a gentleman at large, newly arrived in Paris, with exotic origins and a taste for dilettantism.

  As we ate and drank, Artopoulos elaborated his plans for the Society. He seemed to covet an elevated social station and believed the Society was his means of achieving it. But first, he said, the Society must be restored: as it was, its library was in disarray, its finances a mess, its popularity so diminished that the members could now be counted on a single finger – ‘Unless, old chap,’ he added, slowly lifting another finger, ‘I haven’t altogether discouraged you, and you still wish to join?’

  What choice did I have? ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. I fully intend to return the Baudelaire Society to its rightful place as the most prestigious literary society in France. But currently, I am its only voting member. Without another member to second my motions, nothing can be done. The Society is in a state of complete paralysis.’

  So am I, I thought to myself. Despite my misgivings, he was so relentlessly compelling that he left me no opportunity to leave him without causing offense. As the afternoon progressed, I decided that perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing. I’d left the island to find him, after all, and now, apparently, here he was. And with the others gone, now that I’d found him, I had nowhere else to go.

  After we had eaten, he persuaded me to return to the Society on the Île Saint-Louis. He wanted to show me something, he said. He led me to the library. I studied my surrounds discreetly as we went, once again astonished at how little things had changed in the three decades of my absence. Once at our destination, Artopoulos pulled out a slim volume bound in carmine leather and embossed in gold. He opened a page at random. I immediately recognised the long, sloping handwriting. ‘A short story by Charles Baudelaire, completely unknown to the world. “The Education of a Monster”.’ Artopoulos was testing my composure to its limits. I had to suppress the mnemonic torrent that came with the sight of it. Once again I felt myself under an especially perceptive scrutiny, and once again I felt compelled to dissemble my emotions and simulate a perfect ignorance. No easy task.

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘It is, perhaps, the truest thing he ever wrote.’

  I hesitated, unsure how to proceed. ‘I should very much like to read it.’

  ‘And you shall have your wish, old chap, once you are a member. We shall attend to that this very day.’

  From the Society, we proceeded to his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann. He kept me enthralled so long into the night that, at his invitation, I slept in his guest room. We had, somehow, become instantly inseparable. But below the surface, something far more sinister was afoot, and I had confirmation of it the following day, in the Labrouste Reading Room at the national library, when I found a newspaper article reporting on the recent deaths of Édmonde de Bressy and Lucien Roeg. The account Artopoulos had given me was entirely accurate, other than the omission of a single, crucial detail: the two bodies had been found with their eyes gouged out. I wept hot, silent tears right there in the reading room. I thought of Koroli, the old man at the mission who, after speaking with me, had been murdered in the same way. The evidence wasn’t conclusive, but all the clues pointed in the same direction: it seemed I had found my target. Mehevi, or rather Joubert, had positioned himself at the exact centre of the web. And yet, having caught me, why hadn’t he finished me off? It would become the enduring mystery of our friendship.

  For the next several years, Artopoulos and I remained inseparable. We luncheoned at noon most days, mostly at La Maison Dorée, but occasionally at the Café Anglais or the Café de la Paix, and we often dined in the evening too. We sent each other several letters a day, either by post or by pneumatique, and as soon as it was possible we had telephones installed in our respective homes. We were regular guests at the Lemaire salon on Rue de Monceau and Laure Hayman’s salon on Avenue Hoche. We shared a box at the Opéra and sponsored the same dancers at the Russian ballet. Artopoulos was fond of racing horses, and we were often seen together at the Hippodrome. With the help of connections, he eased my admissi
on into the Jockey Club, despite my obscure origins. On Sundays we would go hunting, driving to his country estate in his Richard-Brasier, or riding along the shaded paths of the Bois de Boulogne, saluting the carriages of the grandes dames of Paris’s demimonde. In the summer, we holidayed in Cabourg.

  Artopoulos was the epitome of the modern gentleman. His cigars were banded with personalised gilt paper rings. His shirts were from Worth or Redfern and were sent to be washed and pressed in London. When he hosted a dinner, he made sure there was always one footman for every three guests. All year round, he filled his home with great bouquets of flowers – preferably chrysanthemums – ordered weekly from Lachaume or Lemaître. He only drank coffee bought from Maison Corcellet, served from a small silver coffee pot engraved with his initials, AA, and with piping hot milk in a porcelain jug. At tea, he served petits fours from Rebattet and brioches from Bourbonneux. And, without ever asking for anything in return, Artopoulos always made me feel a welcome and natural part of his world, a world of soirées and masquerade balls, hunts and boating expeditions, cabarets and casinos. His generosity to me had no bounds. His only complaint, which he used on many occasions to taunt me affectionately, was that I would never look him in the eye.

  Throughout this time, the Baudelaire Society flourished, thanks mostly to Artopoulos’s charisma and connections. He rebuilt it into the glittering social salon he’d described to me when first we met, using it to make his inexorable climb to the highest echelons of society. At its peak, around 1910, the Society boasted among its members such luminaries as the Comtesse de Chevigné, Robert de Montesquiou, Lucien Daudet, Comte Henri Greffulhe, Antoine Bibesco and Anna de Noailles. The guestbook was pocked with such names as the Duc d’Orléans, the Empress Dowager, the King of Greece, the Serbian pretender Karageorgevich, Prince Karl Egon von Fürstenberg and the banker Bischoffsheim. Even the Prince of Wales attended on one occasion, as the guest of Odile de Richelieu.

  What did he see in me? What did I mean to him? What did he want from me? He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. Not once did we attempt to breach our respective alibis. The truth was suspended between us, binding us, unacknowledged and ever-present. It was sufficient to me to be near him, a friend and ally on the surface, but always keeping a watchful eye over him, like a guardian, looking out for a sign that he might once again wreak the havoc I knew he was capable of. I felt a responsibility for him. I never had a plan as such, and in the glow of our friendship, the violence I knew was in him never revealed itself. It seemed I might achieve my purpose simply by being by his side. In all our years of friendship, there were no murders, no eye-gougings. Did I need to wait for him to kill again to act? And, if so, what could I have done? I would surely have had to kill him in turn. I never felt even remotely capable of such an act. What would I have used for the purpose? A pistol? A knife? Poison? It was all unthinkable, and given how perfectly content we were in each other’s company, I deemed it preferable to let things slide.

  *

  I’d decided I didn’t wish to spend my life as a glorified vaudevillian preying on the credulity of the uneducated and broken-hearted. I wished a more respectable destiny for myself. Artopoulos had planted a seed in me, that day over lunch, a seed that grew, watered by my inherited skills in mesmerism, by his encouragement, and by my own interest in understanding the mechanism behind the act of crossing. I would become, I resolved, an alienist. I began to study psychology, at first as an observer of the lectures, for I had no formal qualifications. At the Sorbonne, I took meticulous notes in the lecture hall and, afterward, read everything I could in the libraries. I took tutors and volunteered to be a laboratory assistant. Artopoulos pulled some strings on my behalf and before long I was admitted as a student.

  Within a year of my arrival, I had been accepted into the preparatory classes to study medicine. In 1908 I graduated as a doctor, and began higher studies in psychology. From the start, I’d resolved that my methods would be unorthodox: I would use hypnosis in the treatment of my patients. The idea was not new. It had already been entertained and, ultimately, rejected by the previous generation of alienists. But I had one advantage they didn’t have.

  Along the way I studied under Alfred Binet at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology. Later, I researched retrograde amnesia under Théodule-Armand Ribot, assisted Théodore Flournoy in his study of cryptonmesia, and attended the lectures of Pierre Janet at the Collège de France on memory, trauma, neurotic dissociation and the subconscious.

  I established a private practice treating patients suffering from melancholia or neurosis with the aid of hypnosis. I benefited from Artopoulos’s high-society connections and many of my habitués were members of the Baudelaire Society. My method was unique and controversial: first I would hypnotise, and only then would I analyse. My growing reputation began to attract the attention of the younger generation. Some of them courted my favours, intrigued by the reports of the breakthroughs my clients achieved, which they themselves could not replicate, no matter how closely they imitated me. Little could they guess the secret of my success – I was using the art of crossing to look inside the minds of those I treated. For my patients, there seemed to be something beneficial about it, something restorative and healing simply in the fact of, however briefly, no longer being held captive by an overactive imagination. And while visiting their bodies and minds, I would explore their memories, dreams, illusions and delusions, their secrets, pretences and lies. This way, during the analysis that followed the crossing, I could detect every self-deceit, every avoidance and dissemblance. I came to know my patients better than they knew themselves. I knew when they were lying to me, and more importantly I knew when they were lying to themselves, an all-too-frequent occurrence.

  Around this time, the profession of alienist was undergoing profound changes. It became fashionable, in certain high society circles, to seek the assistance of an altogether new kind of doctor. In March 1910, I attended the Second Congress for Freudian Psychology in Nuremberg and, upon my return to Paris, stopped calling myself an alienist and instead took up the title of psychoanalyst. My method, however, didn’t change.

  If it was a sham of a kind, it was a sham with indisputable results. I was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne, and later at the Institut de France. I published essays in medical journals and popular magazines, and occasionally my name was printed in the newspaper society pages, usually alongside that of Artopoulos. He would tease me about my progress – his favourite joke was to beg me to hypnotise him. In the spirit of the joke, I always refused him good-naturedly, telling him we were too close, that I knew him too well, that he wasn’t suggestible enough. Joking aside, I never trusted him enough to hypnotise him. His friendship was akin to keeping a tiger for a pet: I never allowed myself to forget I might be mauled to death at any moment.

  Perhaps inevitably, I developed a particular interest in the fugue state, which in those days went by several names: travelling fugue, psychogenic fugue, ambulatory automatism, dromomania. The fugue state is extremely rare, so rare it is at best a medical curiosity, hardly the kind of condition upon which a psychoanalyst might build a career. But over time, having published several articles in medical journals on the condition, I came to be recognised as the pre-eminent specialist on the disorder. My interest was, of course, more than merely professional. I had witnessed a fugue state of sorts several times, after each of my blind crossings. On each occasion, I had been its cause. I was haunted by the faces of the bodies I’d just vacated, the physiological mark of the bewilderment that follows an unforeseen crossing. But there was also a practical dimension to my interest: it was a way of looking out for Mathilde. I hoped that, if she was still alive, Mathilde would remember what I’d told her, decades ago before I had gone into exile. If she did make a crossing, if her body was left flailing with bewilderment, and if some doctor somewhere diagnosed it as a fugue state, there was every chance that I, as the only specialist in the field, would be called upon to treat it. As schemes g
o, it may have been far-fetched, but it was my only hope of finding you.

  *

  Only I didn’t find you. Rather, it was you who found me. I was looking out of a window at the Baudelaire Society one morning in the winter of 1911 when I saw a hunchbacked old woman labouring across the Pont Louis-Philippe and then up the Quai d’Anjou. She was dressed in rags, her face obscured by a hood, and was pushing a cart laden with old books. It was a remarkable sight, for she was bent over in two, and getting the wooden wheels over the cobbles of the street was no easy feat. As she neared the entrance to the Society, she was overtaken by the valet, Renand. He was carrying several loaves of bread that would be served at lunch. As he passed her, the old woman said something to him that I could not hear. He answered her briefly, shaking his head, and then entered the building. I made my way to the kitchen, where the valet was helping the cook, Carlotta. I asked Renand what the old woman had said to him.

  ‘Which old woman?’ he said.

  ‘The book peddler you just spoke to outside on the street.’

  ‘Oh, her! She’s a lunatic, not a book peddler. Her books are worthless. I often see her loitering about. She’s always asking me the same thing.’

  ‘Are you talking about the old Belgian woman?’ said Carlotta.

  ‘Yes,’ Renand and I both said at once.

  ‘She does the same thing with me too! She’s been asking me for years, the pet. I feel so sorry for her.’

  ‘What does she ask you?’

  ‘Every time I see her,’ Renand said, ‘she asks if Madame Édmonde has returned.’

  ‘She asks me the same thing,’ added Carlotta.