‘Just as I thought,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s happening. It’s no good.’
‘Try again,’ snapped Artopoulos.
‘No. I don’t think it’s going to work.’
‘Try it again, damnation, and this time don’t look away!’
‘I’m sorry, Aristide, no.’
Artopoulos rose, lunged towards me and slapped me. ‘You fraud!’ he snarled. ‘You liar! You snake! After all I have done for you!’
‘How dare you!’ I said, standing so that we were face to face. I slapped him in return.
He began hitting me with both hands, fists clenched, over and again, cursing me as he did. ‘You are a monster!’ he said. ‘You are evil!’ I covered my head with my arms but I was no match for him. From under his blows, I fell back against the desk, reached back and somehow managed to grab the bell, ringing it vigorously before, with a swipe of his arm, Artopoulos knocked it from my hand. Now, consumed by a scarlet rage, he threw himself upon me until we were both writhing on the desk. He wrestled me onto my back. With one hand, he grabbed me by the throat and began to throttle me while, with the other, he reached his hooked fingers towards my eyes and began digging into them around their edges. At that same moment, the nurse entered the room, saw our imbroglio and screamed. Soon, several orderlies had rushed in, lifted Artopoulos expertly off me and strapped him into his wheelchair, where he continued, as they wheeled him out of the room and down the corridor, to shout, ‘You are evil! You are evil! You are evil!’
I was left breathless and trembling. I rubbed my eyes and my throat and straightened my collar. From my mouth and nose I felt a trickle of blood. The nurse sat me down and went to fetch some gauze and alcohol. Monsieur Julien the registrar rushed in and asked what had happened. As the nurse daubed my wounds, I assured him that no great damage had been done, that no disciplinary action was necessary, that the patient’s outburst was merely the act of a troubled mind, that such things were a professional hazard, that if anything it was a good sign, an indication he would, sooner or later, make a full and complete recovery, only it would not be me treating him, needless to say, no, it would certainly not be me.
When, the following morning, I next saw Madeleine, I was still shaken by the events of the previous day. I’d barely eaten or slept and my mind was racing. That incantation, You are evil, was still ringing in my ears. Was it meant as an insult or a condemnation? I didn’t know then and to this day I still don’t know. It is a profoundly disturbing experience to be judged evil by someone upon whom one has delivered the same judgement.
My entire therapeutic method consisted in making a blind crossing with a patient – that is, a crossing of which the patient would afterward have no recollection, other than a faint, residual impression of psychic relief or alleviation. I had performed it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, and never had a patient ever expressed the slightest hint of awareness of what had just happened. But on this occasion, something went wrong. Perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I’d make a mistake. Perhaps I was run down, or distracted by my reunion with Artopoulos. Perhaps it was subconsciously intended, or provoked by something about Madeleine herself. Whatever the case, it was my intention, as always, that after the return crossing she should have no recollection of what had occurred. But as soon as the initial crossing was complete, I felt something was amiss. I must have overlooked something, or been careless somehow in my method. All the same, I proceeded in my exploration of the patient’s body and mind when she, in my own body sitting in the chair opposite me, spoke.
‘Please,’ she said, in my own voice, ‘I don’t want to go back.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I don’t want to go back,’ she repeated with more emphasis.
‘Go back where?’
‘To my body. To Madeleine. Don’t make me. Please.’
‘You want to stay in that old man’s body?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t let you do that.’
I watched in horror as Madeleine-in-Balthazar rose from the chair and leaned over me, whispering the following words very slowly: ‘You cannot make me go back to that body.’
‘I would remind you that you are under hypnosis, which you entered into voluntarily. When I command it, you will look again into my eyes and you will return to the body that is rightfully yours.’
Balthazar paused, as if considering mutiny, but after a long moment he sat back in his chair and we began the return crossing. I was more determined than ever to leave in Madeleine not a trace of a memory of what had just occurred, but naturally I was also perturbed. My confidence in my abilities was shaken. The technique of crossing is based on a kind of mental purity. Obstructions, distractions, hindrances can tilt the entire process off-kilter. When the return crossing was complete, Madeleine didn’t say anything untoward, but there was something about her expression that suggested her state of mind was not how it was supposed to be. She beheld me with an expression somewhere between wonder and suspicion, markedly different from that depressed countenance that had characterised her demeanour before the crossing.
‘What just happened?’ she asked finally.
‘You were under hypnosis.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘A little under thirty minutes, as we discussed.’
‘And what happened in that time?’
‘You were in a state of deep relaxation the entire time.’
She mentioned nothing more of it, but when we launched into the analysis I found her to be distant and standoffish, and nothing was achieved. I ended the session early.
A fraud lives in perpetual fear of the cataclysm of his unmasking. Days later, I received a letter from the Medical Review Board. I was under investigation, it said, after a patient had made a complaint against me. My methods were to be reviewed by a panel of three specialists the following week: Gustave Roussy, André Léri and Jacques Jean Lhermitte. Until then, I was suspended from my duties. The board had been stacked against me, as if handpicked specifically for the purpose of discrediting me. I knew I had enemies in both the military and medical hierarchies, all of whom considered my methods suspect. Léri, in particular, was my professional nemesis, a champion of electric shock treatment, hostile to any doctor who advocated analysis as treatment for shellshock. He thought hypnosis was quackery. The letter didn’t name the complainant, but I guessed it was Artopoulos. He was going to force me to hypnotise him in front of the review panel. I would be his ticket out of the war after all: he would make a crossing, and I would be the one to return to the trenches, only in his body. In the seventeen years of our friendship, he’d never shown me the slightest enmity. There had never been any question of violence. If one of us had wished to harm the other, we’d forsaken countless opportunities to do so. As his creator, his only link to the past, I’d always been exempted from his vengeful nature. No longer.
The morning of the review, I was pacing up and down in my office when there was a knock at the door. It was Madeleine.
‘Madame,’ I said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you here this morning.’
‘Why not?’
‘My appointments have all been cancelled. Surely you were told. I’ve been suspended. Someone’s made a complaint about me – I don’t know who. I’m supposed to meet with the Medical Review Board in the Great Hall this afternoon. I have to defend my methods before a panel of three doctors.’
She looked at me with a confused expression. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘I have no complaints about your methods, professor.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting it,’ I said with a smile, ‘but I’m glad to hear it all the same.’
‘My only complaint,’ she continued hesitantly, ‘although it’s not a complaint at all really, is the one I expressed last time, while I was under hypnosis.’
I played dumb. ‘Remind me?’
‘That if there is the possibility of passing over into another body, I wish to take it.’
I considered my pre
dicament briefly before concluding I had nothing to gain by insisting on the pretence. ‘Madame, I must be honest with you. Something went wrong. You’re not supposed to remember that.’
‘But I do. I remember everything about it. Most of all, I remember thinking, I don’t want to go back. I meant what I said, professor. I still do.’
I tried to reason with her. ‘I’m sorry, madame, I can’t accept your proposition. It would be a travesty. Do you really want to forsake your youth, health and beauty to live the rest of your days in the body of a middle-aged bachelor?’
‘I want to live someone else’s life. I don’t want to live mine. It’s too painful. Don’t you understand? When I look in the mirror, I look at myself with someone else’s eyes – the eyes of the man who loved me, the man I lost, the only man I will ever love. It is painful for me to look at myself. I cannot extinguish the love that is in me, and every time I see myself I am reminded of it. In order for me to be fully alive I need to leave this body – or I shall have to take my own life.’
‘But you have so much to look forward to, so much still in front of you.’
‘Do I? I’m a widow and an orphan. I’m penniless. I have only a basic education. What do you imagine I have to look forward to if love is out of the question? An empty marriage? Raising the children of a husband I don’t love? A convent? Praying to a god I don’t believe in?’
‘You could be a nurse – you’re obviously very good at it.’
‘There’ll be little need for nurses when the war is over. No, I see nothing in front of me. A long, vast stretch of nothing.’ She turned and looked around the room, and as she looked around it I looked too, following her gaze across the bookshelves and the paintings and the certificates on the walls. ‘Whereas,’ she continued, ‘if I were to spend the rest of my days in your body, even if there were fewer days to live, they’d be better days. I’d be surrounded by books and luxuries. I’d be educated and never want for anything. I’d heal people and move in high circles. If ever I was bored I would simply go back through your memories, and relive for myself one of your many adventures. I imagine there are enough memories in you to last me a lifetime. And of course there is the not inconsiderable advantage that I would be a man.’ She turned to me, took my hands in hers and gave me an imploring look. ‘What do you say, Professor Balthazar? Please, won’t you set me free?’
I looked into her dark sparkling eyes and wondered if I should warn her about Artopoulos, about what had happened to Édmonde and Lucien, about the Baudelaire Society and Charles’s manuscript. If I did so, would she change her mind? Would she decide that her own body, her own life, were not so insufferable after all? But as I wondered these thoughts, I felt that familiar flicker of pleasure as the first stirrings of the crossing began, and I decided that she already knew everything she needed to know.
{124}
Madeleine Blanc
Born 1898
First crossing 1917
BALTHAZAR SAT IN his chair very close to me, staring vacantly at nothing in particular. For a moment, I thought I’d made a blind crossing. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
Balthazar shook his head a little as if recovering from a blow. ‘Fine, I think.’
‘No regrets?’ I asked. ‘No second thoughts? Once I walk out that door, there’ll be no turning back.’ For the sake of my own conscience, I needed to make one last gesture of goodwill before making my escape forever.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘you have granted me my wish. I’m grateful to you.’
To be certain he was fully lucid, I questioned him about his current name, his former name, where we were, the day of the week, the name of the President of the Republic – he remembered everything. ‘You’re not in a fugue state, which is a good sign,’ I said. ‘But I should warn you: you are going to need all your wits about you. This very day, you will face a tribunal enquiring into your clinical methods.’ As I spoke, I saw that memories of the matter came to him, and he nodded with recognition. ‘They will ask you to hypnotise a man called Aristide Artopoulos. I urge you to reflect a moment upon the history of your acquaintance with him.’ Balthazar nodded as memories of Artopoulos rushed to the surface of his mind. ‘The critical thing is that you must not look him in the eye, or he will cross with you. And, believe me, you don’t want that.’
As I shook Balthazar’s hand, I suppressed a shudder at the thought of what might happen if Artopoulos were to divine that this was not the man he was after. I knew I must once again vanish. I didn’t want to lose the advantage I had over Artopoulos – he didn’t know what I looked like. I fled the Villejuif military asylum with nothing more than the clothes on my back. I caught a suburban train to the centre of Paris and went to a shirtmaker’s workshop in the Arts et Métiers neighbourhood run by a Saigonese family I knew from my childhood. They did not turn me away. I stayed with them until after the war. I burned my identity papers and took on the surname Blanc.
From that day on, I lived in hiding – and with good cause. Two weeks later, I learned that Hippolyte Balthazar had been murdered in his own bed. According to the newspapers, his body was found with its eyes removed. My grief was compounded by guilt. There could be no doubt about his killer. As with Édmonde and Lucien, Artopoulos had either had Balthazar murdered by proxy or done the deed himself. I could not know if he had discovered my deception, but I assumed the worst. Either way, the removal of the eyes felt more than just a message or a demonstration of power, I interpreted it as a kind of macabre vow. From now on, the price I would have to pay for my freedom was the torture and murder of innocents.
In ordinary circumstances, such a murder would have scandalised Paris. But the relentless slaughter occurring only a day’s drive away had inoculated Parisians to individual acts of violence. Balthazar’s death was soon forgotten. Artopoulos had him buried with Édmonde and Lucien in the Baudelaire Society crypt at the Montparnasse cemetery – yes, at the very spot we were to meet, you and I, twenty-three years later. It isn’t every day one has the occasion to attend one’s own funeral. It was a modest affair held on a rain-soaked morning. I stood at the back of the small gathering, my identity vouchsafed by my veil. There were barely more than a dozen mourners, all of whom I recognised: clients of Balthazar’s and members of the Baudelaire Society. Artopoulos was there, of course, standing by the graveside. He had given up feigning the tremors of shellshock. Beside him was a striking, square-jawed woman I’d never seen before. Later, I would learn that her name was Gabrielle Chanel, better known by her nickname Coco.
Shortly before Christmas 1920 at the Saint-Quentin market, I spied Renand from across a crowd. We locked eyes momentarily before I managed to duck out of the way. Thankfully, the Christmas throng was thick enough for me to make my getaway before he could catch me. I’d been shopping there since my flight from the asylum, knowing Renand normally went to the Place Maubert market on the other side of the river to buy provisions for Artopoulos and the Baudelaire Society. The encounter rattled me for months. I was sure that Renand had been there looking specifically for me. I haven’t been back to the Saint-Quentin market since.
I resolved to leave the family I’d been boarding with and vanish more completely. I took to living underground, as generations of Parisian fugitives had done before me. For many years I have made my home in the labyrinth of quarries, sewers, tunnels and catacombs below the city’s surface. The subterranean life is easy enough to enter into: all one needs is a belt buckle with which to lift the grates that lead below and a map of the maze of old limestone quarries and abandoned Métro tunnels under the city. Dry, spacious and temperate, they make excellent habitations. I have made a home of several such places, moving only when another fugitive discovers my hideout or when some above-ground construction work makes it unsafe to remain there.
For the last few years, I have resided in the quarry below the Montparnasse cemetery – the grate is very near the crypt of the Baudelaire Society. An iron ladder leads into the quarry. Every afternoon, to
wards closing time, I stand in front of Baudelaire’s grave until the guardian blows his whistle. That’s what I was doing when we met. When I’m quite sure I can’t be seen, I hide among the gravestones until the guardian, having locked all the gates, returns to the gatehouse. When I am quite sure I am alone, I take my belt buckle, lift the lid of the grate and slip into my abode. There are other grates outside the cemetery walls that I can use if, for one reason or another, I cannot be sure that I am alone in the cemetery, but as they are on the street I can only ever do so in the dead of night, and even then, between the homeless men and the streetsweepers, I am courting danger each time.
By far the most joyous occasion of this lifetime has been to find you again, dear Koahu, and to love you again. I never abandoned the hope that somehow we might be reunited, you and I. I never entirely lost faith that your nightmares would lead you back to me somehow. Like a spider in a dark corner, I waited for you. My faith in you has been vindicated. You came to me, even if you don’t know it. Something in you sought me out – how else could you possibly explain it? And though, with your little round glasses and funny moustache, you are much changed, the spirit of Koahu still lives in you.
All this time, I have tried to keep a watchful eye on the happenings at the Baudelaire Society. I have spent my days doing the rounds of booksellers and bouquinistes, keeping up with book gossip, which is always rife with scandal and conspiracy, or when the weather was inclement holing up in a library to browse the newspapers and magazines, study auction catalogues and dissect the annual Gazette de la Société Baudelaire. This is how I learned, a few years after the war, about the death of a bookseller who was said to be selling an unpublished short story manuscript by Baudelaire called ‘The Education of a Monster’. When I read that his eyes had been removed by the murderer, there was no mistaking the culprit. Artopoulos was baiting me, hoping to flush me out of hiding. Whether he had committed the act himself or through some third party mattered little. It was a coded message intended only for me: Here I am, the monster I had created seemed to say. Come and get me if you dare. The longer you wait the more harm I will do. Only you will be to blame.
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