Bride of New France (2 page)

The Salpêtrière was what it had always been: a kind of feminine inferno, a città dolorosa confining 4000 incurable or mad women. It was a nightmare in the midst of Paris
.

—GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN,

INVENTION OF HYSTERIA

    1    

T
he commotion in the courtyard below reaches Laure when she steps into the Sainte-Claire dormitory. There is only Mireille lying in the long room of tightly made beds when Laure enters with Madeleine. The two girls have been given special permission by the dormitory governess to sit with their sick friend for a few minutes before returning to their needlework lessons. Laure doesn’t really believe that Mireille is ill and refuses to show her any sympathy. She knows that Mireille is just trying to get out of her last month in the workshop. Mireille found out last week that she was going to marry an officer stationed in Canada. He is a young and handsome man and wealthy enough that Mireille will not ever have to return to the Salpêtrière. While Laure has been struggling to learn new
point de France
stitches, Mireille has been feigning sickness, the distant soldier’s locket tucked under her pillow. Still, Laure is happy to have an excuse to come up to the empty dormitory. With no officers around, she can talk freely without being hushed or told to start reciting the Pater Noster.

Madeleine rushes past the window toward Mireille’s bed at the end of the room. She has brought with her, in the pocket of
her dress, an ounce of salted butter that she saved from lunch. She takes out the melting pad and brings it to Mireille’s lips.

“Why are you feeding her your lunch? She already gets wine and meat with her pension.” Laure can’t stand to look at Madeleine fussing over Mireille as if she were a blind kitten in need of milk. How can she be the one getting attention when she already has more than the others? Laure walks to the window and looks down at the dozens of people gathered in the courtyard of the Maison de la Force. They have come today to watch the city’s prostitutes being transferred to the Salpêtrière.

The girls of the Sainte-Claire dormitory are forbidden to observe these women. Even mentioning them is punishable. The administrators say that observing the prostitutes will taint the morals of the
Bijoux
. They fear that the years of shaping these carefully selected orphans will be lost by one glance at the ill-reputed women. The Superior herself has told them that their melodic voices singing
Ave Maris Stella
and
Veni Creator
will be spoiled, and that the stitches the
Bijoux
’ fingers have been trained to produce in imitation of Venetian lace will unravel in the coarse company of the
filles de mauvaise vie
.

Laure knows she wouldn’t be a resident of the Sainte-Claire dormitory at all if it hadn’t been for the years she spent being refined in the house of Madame d’Aulnay. Seeing the prostitutes gathered by the archers and the crowd that has come to jeer at them reminds Laure that even the
Bijoux
dormitory of the Salpêtrière, where girls are taught skills, is still a division of the most miserable institution of the kingdom. To those who are not imprisoned within its walls, the Salpêtrière is nothing but a place to lock away the most wretched women of France.

“Madeleine, half of Paris is in the courtyard. We can finally watch the prostitutes being brought in.”

Madeleine’s gentle voice pauses in her recitation of the Pater. Laure waits, but after a moment the girl restarts the prayer from the beginning. Whereas Laure is considered a
Bijou
because of the swiftness of her fingers and the sharpness of her wit, Madeleine is among the favourites of the hospital because she is gentle and kind. The officers must watch over Laure, but they say that Madeleine sets an example for all the lost souls and fallen women of the hospital. Although the tiny girl is but a sheep herself, the officers try to make her a shepherd. They ask Madeleine to read from the giant prayer books at the front of the dormitory. Her voice emerges as the weak murmuring of a distant angel, and the girls hold their breath so they can hear it better. Laure has known Madeleine, her only friend among the girls of Sainte-Claire, since the day she returned to the Salpêtrière at fourteen years old, following her stay with Madame d’Aulnay.

When Laure was ten, Madame d’Aulnay came to the Enfant-Jésus dormitory in search of a servant girl. The children were accustomed to seeing wealthy women walking between their beds, inspecting the
marchandise
, in hopes of finding a girl who could wash and mend clothes, clean floors and scrub pots. Although Laure was afraid, having heard that some mistresses beat their servants with sticks, still she hoped to be chosen. She wanted to go away with one of these wealthy women, to travel by horse, and to see the city beyond the walls of the hospital.

Madame d’Aulnay, who wore bright
fard
on her cheeks and feathers in her hat, stopped in front of Laure’s bed and exclaimed that this was the urchin she wanted. The entire way to her
appartement
, through the filthy and fascinating city,
Madame d’Aulnay prattled on about Laure’s pale complexion and black hair and about all the things she would show her about life outside the hospital walls. Laure felt like her chest would burst. Before long, Madame d’Aulnay acquired an
abécédaire
from one of the women in her salon whose children had already grown. Madame d’Aulnay said that Laure would need to learn to read so she could teach her own children one day. Laure had just turned eleven and was not thinking in the least about having children or falling in love. But these two things, finding love and having children, were the central preoccupations of Madame d’Aulnay, although she was not married and was too old to have children. But Laure didn’t mind all this talk about husbands and babies so long as it meant she could learn to read the marks, called letters, embroidered on the
abécédaire
.

Laure soon memorized them all. The letters were no different from the patterns she was taught to sew in the dormitory, the butterflies, the flowers, the birds, branches, and leaves. She quickly learned the precise shape of each of them. Before long, Laure had moved on to syllables and was soon sounding out familiar prayers and hymns in Latin.

Laure’s most important task in the
appartement
was to serve the women at Madame d’Aulnay’s weekly salon. Madame’s other servant, Belle, who was mean, and frightened even Madame d’Aulnay, had no desire to interact with the women she referred to as the Wednesday Fools. Laure was slow and clumsy in the kitchen, so she just watched Belle, who was strong and quick, as she prepared syrupy cakes, jams, and butter breads. When the trays were laden with sweets and cut fruits, Laure carried them out to the women.

The guests treated Laure like a doll. They would say that with her complexion, it was unfortunate she was born so low in
rank. But isn’t it the way, one of the women said, that the girls with the most beautiful faces are always poor and soon ravaged by it while wealthy women, who have the means to afford powders and perfumes, fine clothing and
une vie aisée
, have only mediocre features to begin with. The women even dressed Laure in some of Madame d’Aulnay’s dresses and coats, but she always ended up looking like a puppy beneath the heavy materials. Of course not all the Wednesday women approved of this play with a mere servant girl, especially those who had daughters of their own who were not so pretty.

Once Laure had learned to read, Madame d’Aulnay taught her to write, a skill that Laure found much more difficult to learn than reading. Madame d’Aulnay said that mostly it is men who write. Even some poor men, she said, sit on street corners as clerks and write out accounts and letters for those who require their services. Sewing and needlework are much more useful for girls to learn, but Laure was already quicker and knew more patterns than most eleven-year-old servants girls, so Madame felt there was no harm in teaching her to write a few words.

Laure first traced the letters in a box of sand, over and over, until Madame d’Aulnay was satisfied that she was ready to try writing them in ink on paper. Madame d’Aulnay sat Laure in front of her
écritoire
and removed from it the objects she would need for writing: a sheet of thick paper made of linen fibres, a goose feather, a small knife to trim the nib of the pen, a vial of ink, an instrument to scratch out mistakes from the paper, and sand, to dry the ink. Laure first learned to sign her name, and once she mastered this skill, Madame d’Aulnay told her that she could already do more than most women in France.

But these memories of a better, more hopeful time are long past. Laure would probably still be in her salon had Madame
d’Aulnay not died three years ago. Being forced to return to the Salpêtrière after her mistress’s death had been a cruel fate. Not even being placed in the Sainte-Claire dormitory or meeting Madeleine, her first and only friend in the hospital, could compensate for her loss. For Laure, the years since Madame d’Aulnay’s, clothed in the hard grey hospital linen, have passed like a prison sentence.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to sit over there brooding and miss out on your chance to see this. Why don’t you tell Mireille to come and see for herself? She might learn something for her new prince in Canada.” Madeleine does not respond. Laure turns back to the window and the scene below.

The Superior has reason to be concerned about the morality of the Sainte-Claire girls. After all, the Salpêtrière houses every sort of woman imaginable in the kingdom. Laure has even heard that there is a woman of the court imprisoned in a special chamber on a
lettre de cachet
from the King. There are also some Protestants, and a few foreign women, from Ireland, Portugal, and Morocco, mixed in with the others. Laure isn’t sure of all the hospital’s divisions. Only that there are about forty other dormitories. Infants are kept in the
crèche
, slightly older boys and girls are put in separate dormitories. There are also several divisions for girls working at cloth making and bleaching, one for pregnant women, another for nursing women and their children, several for madwomen young and old, a number for women with infirmities—blindness, epilepsy. There are a few dormitories too for old women, and one for husbands and wives over the age of seventy. There are no men in the Salpêtrière between the ages of eleven and seventy, other than the archers and the servant boys.

The people gathered in the courtyard of the Maison de la Force are standing in clusters, exchanging news and gossip.
Their voices are loud and punctuated by laughter. Occasionally, someone will glance back at the entrance to the courtyard, eager for the prostitutes’ arrival. Laure can see that the people are dressed in tattered clothing and have the same vulgar tongues as some of the Salpêtrière residents. Sometimes a voice will rise above the others carrying a piece of information. She learns things the officers do not tell the residents. The administrators attempt to keep the divisions of women from mixing. Of course, occasional stories still manage to find their way through the dormitory walls, fragments that are whispered at church service, embellished during the long workdays, and passed along so often that they become legends. There are women that everyone knows even though they have long since gone. The Baudet sisters who seduced the cardinal in his antechamber. Jeanne LaVaux who took over her father’s poison trade. Mary, the twelve-year-old Irish girl who had been a prostitute since she was six.

Laure is hungry for these stories. She wants to know all that she can about the hospital that is her home and prison. Below, she hears a man with the voice of a market vendor telling the others that the prostitutes are brought to the Salpêtrière once a month. They are gathered in by street constables and held in a smaller prison on rue Saint-Martin until they are transferred here by cart. The man who screams out this information is quickly surrounded and questioned by others who are eager to learn anything they can about the captured women before they arrive. Clearly, this spectacle provides entertainment for those who cannot afford the price of an opera ticket. For the administrators of the General Hospital, the public humiliation will provide the first of the women’s punishment.