Memory of Flames (21 page)

LEFING was scarlet with fear and anger. Of all things, madness frightened him the most. He had a long-standing and obscure dread - it must have its roots deep in his psyche — that if he ever set foot in an asylum, he would be locked up there indefinitely. He even wondered if this was what Margont had in mind. He was somewhat reassured by the fact the Salpetriere was only for women, but what if this was a ruse, and he was later carted off to Bicetre or Charenton? Margont, who was aware of his friend’s fears, tried to be as reassuring as possible.

‘Stop battling your demons! We’ve only come to interview Dr Pinel.’

Pinel, Pinel ... Lefine had heard of the famous doctor. It was pride that forced him on - he would not flee from his chimeras. But he felt as oppressed, as if all the buildings of the Salpetriere were closing in on him.

Margont gave the doorkeeper a few coins and he let them through.

The place was vast. There were rows of little houses, courtyards, gated yards, gardens filled with trees (walking in the shady fresh air was part of the treatment), streets, a chapel ... It was a city inside a city, a little Paris inside a big one. Margont felt uncomfortable in the closed environment cut off from the rest of the world.

‘It’s like a prison in here! Or a fortress, Castle Madness ...’

Women were strolling along the lime-tree-lined paths. Some of them were on their own; some were with keepers or nuns (the Empire had recalled the nuns sent away during the Revolution). As soon as any of them looked at Lefine, he felt his fears getting the better of him. Although the vast majority of the inmates were not lunatics, Lefine saw mad people everywhere, in their thousands; they were circling him and Margont, and were about to leap on them, and beat them and suffocate them and crush them under their weight. The more he told himself his fears were ridiculous the more his imagination inflated them.

‘Why are we here?’

Margont pointed out the Saint-Louis Chapel, the little masterpiece built by Liberal Bruant, who was better known as the designer of the Hotel des Invalides.

‘I disapprove of it. Ostensibly it allows the inmates to pray in a consecrated place. But I think it’s much more about preventing them from going out. Supposing an inmate wants to go for a walk in the Botanical Gardens nearby? Well, she can’t; she’ll be told to walk in the Salpetriere gardens. She wants to go to church? She can go to the Salpetriere chapel. Go for a swim? In the Salpetriere. Get married? In the Salpetriere. The Salpetriere! The Salpetriere! The Salpetriere! All this here has been built so that the inmates never have to go out! All of life takes place within these walls. Nothing exists outside these walls. It’s like being in a sort of secular abbey for lunatics and old women!’

He remembered the years he had spent in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert and dizziness clouded his vision. One of the wings of the Salpetriere exploded in front of his eyes. Stones and mortar were scattered by twelve-pound cannonballs and

Austrian artillery shells. It was his fury that had set off the imaginary explosion. The walls were hurled into the air where they broke up like papers torn up in rage; they were pulverised; their debris rained down like the drops of a violent spring storm; clouds of dust blended together forming an ochre fog ... The battle moved past, receding into the distance. Calm descended. And the lunatics and paupers, much to their astonishment, found themselves free to come out from their shelter, climb through the gaping holes in the walls and wander off, at liberty, into Paris ...

The warden who was guiding Margont and Lefine indicated a building, telling them that they should go up to the first floor, and then went back to his post.

‘Why are we here?’ repeated Lefine.

‘We’re going to ask Dr Pinel about burns inflicted after death.’ Lefine thought that was ... was ... how should he put it? There were no words strong enough to express what he thought it was. Absurd, stupid, irrelevant, idiotic, ridiculous, laughable, capricious, grotesque, mad, dangerous, unreasonable! All that and much more besides!

‘A doctor of the mind will have a different perspective from ours. Perhaps he will already have encountered a deranged criminal who burns his victims after they’re dead,’ said Margont.

‘Why choose Pinel? I vaguely recognise his name.’

‘He was the one who freed the lunatics. In 1793, when he’d just taken up his post at the hospice of Bicetre, he decided to free the madmen from their chains. To the horror of the wardens. Their argument was that some of the patients were deranged, raving lunatics whom it was necessary to keep in chains day and night, but Pinel’s point was that it was the restraint that caused them to be violent. He decided to begin by freeing twelve of them.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember! One of the men freed was Chevinge, a simple soldier who thought he was a general and was giving orders to all and sundry. I was told about it when we were bivouacking and it made a big impression on me. Because I’ve always secretly wondered if Irenee will end up like Chevinge. When he was a lieutenant he behaved like a colonel and now that he’s pretty much a colonel,

he thinks he’s already a marshal. He’s been put in charge of a legion so he thinks he’s Julius Caesar. If he gets promoted any further he’s going to want to overthrow the Emperor ... or Louis XVI—
11/

Margont did not react to the reference to monarchy.

'I'm not sure if it’s myth, but apparently some of the patients he liberated were instantly cured and none of them was violent any more. It sounds too good to be entirely true. But I hope that Pinel was not the only doctor to unchain mad people ... In any case, he did it and how do you think he was rewarded? He was transferred to the Salpetriere less than two years later, where he also freed the mad people!’

Margont was excited but nervous. He was gearing himself up to meet one of the people he most admired - a veritable living legend! - and was fearful that the reality would not live up to his expectations.

They went inside the building and were greeted by shouting. A young woman was being forcibly restrained by wardens under torrents of cold water. She was yelling, and struggling, soaked to the skin, her hair plastered to her head, her lips blue. The staff were struggling to control her, water spurted on all sides and Margont was splattered. Lefine, who kept behind Margont, received only a drop on his hand. But he whitened as if all the heat of his body had been absorbed by this one little drop as cold as a snowflake.

‘Watch out!’ fumed Margont. The meeting was terribly important to him and here he was with wet coat and trousers. ‘What are you doing? That water is freezing!’

He rarely made use of his authority in that way, but he had spoken to the men in the tone of a lieutenant-colonel reprimanding his soldiers, even though he was not wearing uniform.

Lefine muttered to him in a conciliatory tone, ‘We’re in civilian clothes, watch out - they might think you’re another Chevinge ...’ One of the wardens looked Margont up and down.

‘It’s to refresh her. Dr Pinel says it helps relax someone who is having bad thoughts. A good cold shower abruptly interrupts the

flow of those thoughts/

‘What does that mean? Bad thoughts?’

The poor creature imagines that God is talking to her, that she’s a saint!’

‘And besides, she’s being punished,’ countered another warden. ‘Because she refuses to eat. She’ll be sprayed until she agrees to feed herself.’

Not knowing much about illnesses of the mind and their treatment, Margont dared not interfere any further. But he was consumed with doubt as he turned away to go upstairs.

The hallway on the first floor was very crowded. Several of the residents were waiting to see Dr Pinel. One of them had her arms immobilised in a strait-jacket and was surrounded by three keepers. Although unable to move, her eyes expressed unbounded fury. Was her rage the cause of her immobilisation or the consequence of it? Margont wondered if he would have dared free her had he had the power to do so.

‘There are too many people,’ remarked Lefine. ‘Instead of wasting time, let’s come back tomorrow. Or another day ... or never...’ Margont didn’t answer. A strange little episode was unfolding. An old man was walking towards him, to the consternation of the staff Three keepers and two municipal guards were following him, while two other guards took up position at the top of the stairs to block the way down. The man looked about eighty, but could have been younger and aged by what he had suffered. His manner and bearing were aristocratic. He was probably a nobleman of the
 
an-cien regime.
 
A man of the past therefore and now, perhaps, a man of the future. He was dishevelled, in grubby clothes with an ill-adjusted cravat and a crumpled black ribbon on the ponytail of his tousled wig. He appeared relaxed, warmly welcoming and unruffled, at ease in his shrunken universe.

He accosted Margont with an affable Ah, Monsieur! I see you are an ardent supporter of liberty!’

Margont felt as if he had been seen through, as if, under the old man’s regard, his body had turned to glass and his innermost thoughts were on display like coloured fluids in a crystal

container. What clairvoyance! How had the man been able to read him so clearly? Was it a coincidence? Or was it just that some people’s insanity was actually just a different way of seeing things? The fallen aristocrat - Margont was pretty sure that’s what he was - saw that he was perplexed.

‘It’s simply that I observe that the lack of liberty here shocks you, whereas it reassures your friend. Do you know that liberty harbours a paradox? Everyone says they want it, but at the same time they’re afraid of it!’

The remark touched a chord with Margont.

‘Everyone wants it!’ the man said again. ‘But when we have it, we hurry to throw it off again. We had kings and once we had overthrown them, we replaced them with an emperor!’

Margont thought he could guess the reason for those guards. The man was probably a republican who had plotted to overthrow Napoleon. A noble republican, by all appearances. He must be a political prisoner. But what was he doing outside Pinel’s office? Did he also have an illness of the mind? He seemed very lucid.

And the Salpetriere was only for women. Whatever the case, the man was brave to criticise the Emperor openly.

‘Let’s take another example. The Revolution demolished religious power. So what do men and women do? Do they take the chance to live freely? No, they marry each other and swear undying loyalty. They bask in monogamy! You, however, seem to cherish freedom for what it really is.’

He laid his hand on Margont’s arm as he said this, to emphasise the sincerity of what he was saying. However, the gesture felt a little like a caress. Margont pulled his arm away, more sharply than he intended.

The old man then said regretfully, ‘Oh ... oh, what a shame ... You’re just like all the others, after all. Freedom only appeals to you in the abstract, and not as something to be fully savoured. You want to spend your life seeking it, but only on condition that you never find it...’

‘That’s not true at all! You’re mixing everything up!’

‘Whilst you, on the other hand, separate everything out! You

separate the various liberties and rank them, accepting some and forbidding others. Isn’t that just a way of killing off freedom? Isn’t freedom all or nothing? How can one be half free?’

At that point, one of the municipal guards intervened: ‘Monsieur le Marquis, be quiet!’

To Margont’s discomfort, the man performed a deep pantomime bow, exaggerating the movement of his arms, then straightened up and patted into place the disordered hair of his powdered wig.

‘I am Comte Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, better known by the name of Marquis de Sade. Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

‘Unfortunately I cannot tell you. However, I can tell you that I have read
Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu.
 
It was very ... um ... original.’

The Marquis de Sade was overjoyed. ‘A reader! I have fewer of those than I have lovers!’

‘You’re embellishing your role, Monsieur le Marquis ...’

‘Ah, but that’s all that’s left to me now: my role! Since the real de

Sade was imprisoned by the monarchy, then imprisoned by the Revolution, then imprisoned by the Consulate, who then sent him to the madhouse; and the Empire keeps him locked up ... The entire world is against me! When I was incarcerated in Sainte-Pelagie - me amongst the saints, the judicial authorities must have a sense of humour! - I was accused of seducing the prisoners. It was true but the conclusion drawn from it was that I was a lunatic and I was sent to Bicetre! Now I’m at Charenton. The great Pinel wants to see me and that will be a pleasure because apparently he’s a little more enlightened than his colleagues. Unfortunately, if he concludes that I am of sane mind, I will have to leave Charenton ... and I will immediately be sent to prison! So it’s in my interests to appear insane and I plan to indulge my “role”, as you call it, to the full. That’s what society today forces me into. And they say it’s me who’s mad.’

He leant towards Margont and whispered in his ear, ‘If one fine day you finally decide to avail yourself fully of all the freedom nature has to offer, you know my address: hospice de Charenton ...'\

Pinel’s office door opened and a woman and a guardian came out. Margont marched shamelessly over, pushing in front of everyone, saying he was sorry, but his problem could not wait. As he crossed the corridor, gesturing to those trying to go in in front of him to let him through, the Marquis de Sade shouted to him, ‘Do you know what my greatest regret is, Monsieur? In 1789, I was still imprisoned in the Bastille! I had been there for six years and I stayed until 4 July 1789. Until 4 July 1789! Had the Revolution broken out just ten days earlier, the King would have been overthrown and de Sade freed, and I guarantee you that France today would have been nothing like it is now. I would have shown all those revolutionaries the true face of liberty! France failed its revolution. By just ten days!’