Mesmerised (7 page)

Day of Leisure

May 3rd

‘
If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.’

Emile Zola

I’m once again at Père Suisse with my painter colleagues. Camille, of course, is nearly always there, and when he misses a session those that have turned up are temporarily in mourning. He is like a fa
ther figure to us all. Paul has turned up. He is the one that I believe Camille has a special eye on, although his paintings are to my perception bizarre, with every subject and object outlined in bitumen, quite childlike, quite admirable. Claude pays us a nostalgic visit, and Victorine, as usual, is here.

‘
We’re going to amaze the public,’ Camille says excitedly.

‘I think we will shock them,’ says
Paul. ‘Whistler’s “White Girl”
, Dejeuner sur l’Herbe
… .’

All eyes turn to Victorine. She is the female model in
Edouard’s painting.

‘I agree, they won’t understand,’ she says, shrugging her shoulders. ‘But actually, we are naïve if we ever thought they would.’

I find myself nodding. ‘You are prepared then, Victorine?’

‘We will cause a furore, of course, and everyone will be talking about our revolution.
But it takes time for new ideas to be accepted by the people; the general public are sheep.’

‘Quite the philosopher, Victorine,’
Paul says.

‘It’s our chance to exhibit. We must hope for the best,’ says Camille.

Claude remains quiet, shifting his long black hair behind his ears, twitching his drooping moustache and focusing his jet eyes intently on his painting. It is of the view through the window, another depiction of his beloved Seine.

‘Maybe
no one will turn up,’ says Paul.

Victorine is finishing her watercolour of La Notre Dame. She noisily drops her paintbrush into the jar.

‘Aren’t you friends with Zola?’ Camille asks. ‘An article from him to whet the public appetite, why not?’

‘Promising something novel packed with diversity and spice,’
Paul laughs.

‘Why don’t you invite him to preview our art?’

‘Perhaps I will.’

Silence.
There’s a sudden commotion in the building. It’s coming from the landing just outside the studio. Père Suisse scratches his stomach and shuffles out to see what is going on. With the door open, the din tumbles in with greater volume. Two youths push past an aggravated Père Suisse. The concierge stands behind them.

‘I will not have you louts in my building,’ he says holding his stomach and waving his index finger above his head. ‘I know your sort with your thieving, grubby hands.’

The two boys stand panting as if before a headmaster.

‘Mum sent me,’ one of the boys cries.

It’s Gustav Bonnet.

‘Al
l right everyone,’ I say, standing up. My chair scratches noisily backwards across the wooden floor. ‘I know this boy. Gustav what are you doing here?’

‘A man called de
Bellio was knocking at your door and the concierge told everybody to get out.’

‘He was screaming that all the other tenants had had just about enough of you,’
said the other, elder boy, panting.

‘I don’t follo
w. Why was the concierge vexed?’

‘They’re queuing right around the block for you and right up to your door,’ Gustav says.

‘Who’s queuing? I don’t understand.’

‘It was my mum. She told everybody that you cured me of the shits. Some man died in his sleep because of them. Another man said
that it was in all the newspapers that the water had become poisoned and everyone’s blaming Napoleon and his lackey Haussman for saying it’s all been cleaned up.’

‘And Georges, I mean Monsieur de
Bellio? He’s meant to be in Romania.’

Both boys shrug. ‘Told us where you were,’ Gustav’s friend says.

I make my excuses and follow the boys back to rue Faubourg Saint Denis. They run ahead of me, looking behind every so often to see that I am still there. With every step, I become angrier. Not with the queue outside my front door or with the concierge who views the incident as a disturbance of the peace, but with the bloody mindedness of those who won’t acknowledge the validity in treating epidemics with a medicine that works. Where’s Zola now? I ask myself. Where’s the writer who continually tells the knuckle bone truth about our society? Will he cover this? I seriously doubt it. The last time someone wrote a piece highlighting the success of Hahnemann’s medicine, its detractors, our eminent professors, shot him down in print for favouring fakirs and witches with murdering ways. He was not gainfully employed again, so I am told.

I arrive at the tenement to find only a few stragglers hovering in the courtyard. The concierge and a policeman with a paunch and stony eyes are there to greet me. My guides have made themselves scarce.

‘This is him,’ Monsieur Breton says.

The policeman takes my arm. I shake it free and say, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Let’s go inside,’ he says, with one hand on my back pushing me along.

I sit on a chair in Monsieur Breton’s tiny kitchen. He leans on the portal wiping his hands on a cloth. The heat from the stove is stifling
. I can smell stale hops and garlic on the policeman’s breath. ‘Your friends started a riot in the street whilst they were waiting for you,’ he says, motioning with his head towards Monsieur Breton. ‘He says you’re a doctor, but I’ve listened to the evidence about your behaviour. You have followers amongst the common people and I just want to warn you that the government will not take kindly if you’ve started your own anti-establishment party.’

‘I am not a politician.’

‘We don’t need another revolution.’

‘I’m a doctor. I’m also an artist and I rushed back from a painting session with some of my peers because I was informed that those people who were queuing outside here were potential patients
… all of them not well.’

‘They were overheard discussing that this was because of a defect in the new water supply.’

‘Apparently an article in a newspaper made that suggestion.’

‘And you found a crowd to prove it, isn’t that so?’

‘I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Don’t worry
, I am not going to arrest you,’ he says, moving away from me. ‘I am sure that Monsieur Breton will do his job and keep an eye on you. I don’t want you to be the cause of any more fighting on the street – in my area – do you understand?’

I remain silent with indignation
. His open palm slaps my ear. I hear the crack then a ringing sound. The flesh of my lobe burns

‘Monsieur Breton, you didn’t see that, did you?’

Monsieur Breton slowly shakes his head.

I say that I understand.

When Blanche arrives at eight o’ clock with wine and a
cassoulet, there are not many left outside my door, I advise the remaining few to come back tomorrow. She is cold and I put the fire on whilst she warms up the food which she tells me took all afternoon to shop for and cook. Then we sit on the floor facing each other with our plates in our laps and I tell her how my day has been.

‘I didn’t realise that to be true to myself my life would be so controversial. Sometimes it’s like fighting the whole world.’

‘If you want,’ she says. ‘You can give me a remedy.’

‘You have to answer some questions. Did I tell you already that this is delicious?’

Her smile is magnanimous. ‘Yes,’ she says ‘And Paul, you can go ahead and ask.’

‘Ask what?’

‘You know. Ask.’

She is h
olding me steadily with her gaze. For one moment I think that she is giving herself to me.

‘Ask the questions you have to ask
, for the remedy.’

‘Yes, of cours
e, of course, when did the coughing start?’ I say, rising up off the rug and almost dropping my plate. I run over to my desk to get paper and a pen. ‘Hold on,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t want to miss a thing.’ I run back, pen in mouth, paper flapping underneath my plate. She laughs, tells me I look like a kid in an egg and spoon race and kisses me spontaneously on the cheek as I once again sit down. Her eyes glow warmly in the firelight.

‘It started two months ago. I was teaching violin to a pupil in a school. It was nearly the end of the lesson and I was writing down instructions for the boy’s homework practice.’

‘You haven’t had it on and off since childhood?’

‘Yes I have, but this is different.’

‘How is it different?’

‘It’s gone on longer and it’s worse.’

‘And this bout first began two months ago, you said.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there any reason for your cough to have started then? Did anything happen that could have upset your system?’

‘The boy upset me.’

‘Forgive me for prying but it will help me find your remedy; in what way did the boy upset you?’

‘He’s a very sensitive child.’

‘And?’

‘I’m sorry Paul, but I would be breaching a confidence if I told you. I know that you know his father and I’m not going to say.’

The fire crackles and spits embers into the flue.

‘Blanche, I only need to know your reaction.’

‘I felt upset for the boy.’

I wait
a moment to see if she’d say more.

‘When is your cough worse?’

‘At night, when I am outside in the cold.’

‘Is there anything that makes it better?’

‘Warmth. Hot drinks. When you rubbed my back the other night.’

‘Any other symptoms?’

She does not answer and I can see from her face that it is a wilful silence. I place my hand on her shoulder.

‘I need to know.’

‘Sometimes there is blood when I cough into the handkerchief.’

I have been writing and listening and observing and taking notes. Some gravy from my fork falls onto the page. It appears to me like the blood on my arm that fell from my nose. I think of giving
Phosphorus immediately. When the problem began she was feeling sympathetic to the plight of another, this is how I felt when I was making the remedy.

Sympathy
equals Phosphorus.

‘I have your remedy. I am in the middle of making it. I will do it tonight,’ I say.

She places a hand on my thigh and mouths the word ‘no’. She takes my plate into the kitchen and when she comes back she kneels before me. She reaches for my hand, pulls me down until I am kneeling too. I feel the heat from her fingers in my hair. There is an invisible cloud of patchouli perfume. I want to touch but I am afraid of hurting her. ‘Oh Christ,’ I mutter, but she has found my lips with a finger and then the warmth of her breath is upon me and I am aware of her lips, her tongue … .

With first light, I open my front door and two painted canvases lean against the wall. One is a gold, bejewelled jug on a tarnished background with a message attached to it. The note says, ‘Thanks for all your help,’ and like the painting is signed Victorine
Meurent. The other artwork is of the countryside around Paris and boasts rich green foliage. It is signed Camille Pissaro.

I hang Camille’s over the fireplace and Victorine’s on the wall behind my desk. When I look upon these two works, I breathe a
lighter air. The spirit of the artist is not confined to the canvas. It flies around the room and sits on my cheek like a kiss of hope.

My Mentor, Clemens

May 4
th
(A reflection)

‘When we see men of worth, we should think of equalling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inward and examine ourselves.’

Gustav Courbet

Emotions hang out like shirttails and are not so easy to tuck in
. I’ve set up an easel, placed paints on top of a board, but when feelings grab, they stun, and now I’m sitting on the windowsill watching the view of the street two stories below.

There’s a man down there I think I recognise
, a grey haired gentleman with a youngish face. He holds an ebony cane with an elaborate gold pommel in one hand as he brushes the dust off his clothes with the other. He looks up at this building and I jolt my head backwards so as not to be seen. He looks down again, checks his watch, then walks off towards La Chapelle. The man is Alain Desmarais. As his carriage pulls away in the opposite direction, huge red and yellow wheels catch me in their circular motion. They turn back the years to 1848, a lecture hall:

‘You drill holes here and here.’ Doctor Jacques Canard pointed at a drawing of a skull, with a stubby finger. ‘It helps with malaise.’

‘But has it ever cured anyone?’ I called out.

‘Monsieur Gachet, you always pose the most irksome of questions, probably because you wish to be perceived as someone a lot cleverer than you really are. I would like to remind you, and everyone else at this point, that you are not learning to be gods here, you are learning to become physicians. It will be your job to help
manage
suffering,
not
to become a healer. Monsieur Gachet, if that is your ambition I suggest you enrol at The Institute of Psychic Studies. That is if you can ever find it from your lowly position down here on Earth.’

With laughter ringing in my ears, I walked out, resisting the temptation to slam the door.

‘Well, Gachet?’ Professor Bernard asked. He sat back, crossed his legs, placed an elbow on the arm of his chair and
made a wave of his fingers. Late afternoon sunrays spilled in through the sash window creating a veil for his face and blond hair.

‘I am struggling
, Professor.’

‘In what respect?
Can you be more specific? I have not heard from any of your tutors that you are lagging behind.’

‘I am
morally challenged by the way the course is taught,’

‘Ah,’ Bernard said, rising from his seat to look out of the window at the courtyard.

‘What is the most stupid thing you have ever done?’ he asked. He sat down again, gesturing with his wrist for me to take a seat and smiling through teeth that matched his dark grey suit. I lowered myself into the chair on the other side of a large mahogany desk and leaned forward.

‘When I was twelve, I jumped off a rampart into a moat.’

‘Reckless lad,’ Bernard said quietly, as if speaking to himself and then louder, ‘Well, I suppose you could have answered, “To enroll on this course”, but you didn’t, so clearly you still have a mind for the profession. Exactly which part of your studies here do you find a challenge to your finer instincts, Monsieur Gachet?’

‘Lobotomy is
barbaric, I have a right to question it.’

‘You are not questioning. You are making a statement about an accepted form of treatment. You are a first year student, Monsieur Gachet
, what can you know?’

The Professor stood and walked around his desk. He looked at me with dull staring eyes. Rancid sweat mingled with sweet perfume surged through my nostrils and I tried not to breathe.

‘Enough. Time for you to go.’

At the door, with my palm on the porcelain knob, he
hissed, from so close behind me that his breath wavered the hairs on my neck, ‘You’re an idiot, Gachet! You’ll end up dispensing herbs from Culpepper’s quackery, and cheating the world with homeopathy.’

They had been waiting for me. Hands in pockets, backs against the wall. As soon as the door slammed they fell in line behind me. Ran down the stairs like an avalanche in my wake.

‘Hey Gachet, slow down.
Have you seen any ghosts lately? Woo, woo, woo,’ called Alain Desmarais, the handsome son of a banker who had once informed me that I should be very careful about what I think, and what I say, because his father had direct access to the only god that mattered.

I pushed my way through big wooden doors into the courtyard, and was strangely comforted by a slap of cold air to my face. An aristocratic looking gentleman, with a silk scarf and greatcoat tails flapping, handed me a leaflet. I put the piece of paper in my pocket and walked away from the university as fast as I could.

I took a holiday. One day away from Bernard and Canard. I sketched the professor with rays of sunlight concealing most of the features on his face. It was a dark morning. Rain fell through cracks in the skylight onto the end of my nose, and soaked my moustache. It splashed onto my eyelashes, drowning out my vision, and I was suddenly hurrying to open the cupboard and pull out the bucket.

Some ghostly force took my breath away. I needed to get out. In the street I walked fast through the onslaught of a massive downpour. It was before the rebuilding of the city. There were no pavements and the roads were cobbled. Terraced houses and shops had holes in their roofs. Huddling in the doorway of a tavern, I searched my pockets for change that would buy me dinner and a beer. As I pulled out some coins from my trouser pocket, they slipped through my fingers, rolled and lodged themselves in the dirt between stones. I came forward, dodging a horse and cart, to retrieve them. I brushed mud away and dropped the money back into my pocket where I felt a piece of paper and pulled it out to investigate.

Baron Clemens Maria Franz von Boenninghausen will be giving a talk in the chapel of the hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière at half past the hour of seven tomorrow evening for all those interested in Samuel Hahnemann’s Homeopathy by the means of which I have been cured myself of tuberculosis, some twenty years ago.

I nearly balled the leaflet in my fist and threw it away.
‘You’re an idiot, Gachet! You’ll end up end up a quack, dispensing herbs from Culpepper’s quackery, and cheating the world with homeopathy.’
I resolved to go to the meeting.

It was a small chapel, a place for the newly grieved to kneel and say their prayers. By ten minutes before seven it was already twilight. Candles burned all around the altar. It had stopped raining hours ago but a cold wind rattled the windows and seeped in through a multitude of fissures in the structure. I sat in a pew in the middle of three rows and breathed heat through my hands. I was alone, wondering if anyone else would come, and was starting to question whether even Baron Clemens Maria Franz von Boenninghausen had changed his mind on such a miserable evening. Just then, a group of young men burst through the door. They were dandyish in tight fitting trousers, long collared shirts and frock coats. They were the same three students who had pursued me before. They sat next to and behind me. The scent of fermented hops was heady in the air.

‘It’s “I’m going to save the world Gachet
” come to listen to a talk on homeopathy,’ slurred Alain Desmarais, an arm resting on the back of the pew and a leg along the seat, his foot almost but not quite touching my thigh. ‘Yes, I bet you are interested in all this poxy stuff.’

‘We’ve come specially to keep you company,’ someone said from behind me
. I could feel fingers digging into my shoulder through my jacket. The door squeaked on its hinges. I turned to see the man who handed me the leaflet, very tall, upright and elderly with a shock of white hair and bushy whiskers around his baldpate.

‘Good evening gentlemen,’ he said,
walking down the aisle.

He sat on the dais at the front, very casually, pulling up his trouser legs.

‘We are a very small gathering,’ he called out in a foreign accent. ‘I have prepared a speech but I would rather not read it out. Instead, I would like to speak to you honestly, man to man, off the cuff and from the heart. My subject tonight is homeopathy. And no, before you ask, I am not a medical doctor. Neither will I advertise myself as being one. What I am is a homeopathist, amongst other things. And you are all medical students?’

Alain
Desmarais laughed, and choked on his saliva.

‘I see, so first, let me tell you who I am and
why I’m sitting before you tonight, for I am sure that you are all very sceptical indeed. I will start by telling you my story, so you can see that I have no need to set myself up as a charlatan.’

‘Oh, but you are!’ Alain
Desmarais called out.

The Baron continued.

‘I started my career, after graduating, as a Doctor of Civil and Criminal Law at the court of Louis Napoleon, King of Holland. I am also an agriculturalist. I formed the first agricultural society in the west of Germany, and have acted as President of the Provincial Court of Justice for the Westphalia district, evaluating land. But in 1827 I suffered from a serious derangement of health. I will not bore you with the symptoms, suffice to say that I had tuberculosis.

‘The
allopaths worked on me for a whole year. I was tossed into cold baths and had leeches thrown at me to swell and drop off my skin as they sated of my blood. I was administered mercury and heroin. For a long while those medicines put me into a state where I would not have cared whether I lived or died, quite frankly. My dear wife tells me I was a nightmare to live with and no doubt at times, prayed for the latter. I was far from cured.

‘In the spring of 1829, I wrote to my good friend,
Doctor Weihe, believing it to be my last correspondence. I had no idea he was a homeopath. I knew him as a botanist. He wrote back lecturing on hygiene and asked me of my symptoms. As he was interested, I drew him a lengthy account of my suffering. He sent me back a small vial of pillules that contained a highly dilute form of the windflower pulsatilla. I took my friend’s medicine twice daily and by the end of the summer I proclaimed myself cured.’

Alain began to clap slowly.
‘Quack, quack.’

‘Tell me, Monsieur, why are you so angry that this anecdote happens to be the truth? Do you really think I would have come here to talk to four students instead of eating a hot dinner and drinking fine wine at my son’s home, if it was not so? I am not peddling snake poison in the city square, for God’s sake!’

Alain Desmarais stood, aimed his arm backwards and threw a tomato as if he was bowling a cricket ball. The orb splattered in the space between Baron von Boeninghausen’s eyebrows. His friends laughed and catcalled. The Baron rose to an imposing figure. ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he said.

‘Deluded old fool,’
came a voice from behind me.

‘Come on, let’s go. This is boring,’ said Alain
Desmarais.

Pushing and shoving at each other, the gang departed.

I stayed in my seat. He shook a red satin handkerchief out of the top pocket of his greatcoat and wiped his forehead. I watched as the fruit juice seeped and darkened the fabric as if from blood.

‘We are alone,’ the Baron
called.

‘I think so.’

‘And you are, Monsieur?’

‘I am Paul Ferdinand Gachet of Lille.’

‘I’ve seen you somewhere, recently. Where have I seen you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come, think man; I’ve just been attacked by hoodlums!’

‘Maybe down by the water, on the banks of the Seine. If I have time, I go there to paint
en plein air
.’

‘If you are an artist, why are you here tonight? The subject I intended to focus on is very much a science.’

‘I am also a medical student, and with respect Monsieur, Leonardo Da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist.’

‘Are you interested in homeopathy or have you also come to wear me down?’

‘I am interested in a gentler medicine that works. I know nothing about homeopathy.’

‘Its practise requires an endurance
of flying tomatoes.’

‘I would like to learn how to
do it.’

‘Homeopathy is not something you do. A
homeopathist is something you become. Here … ,’ he said, waving a book with a brown suede cover in the air. ‘ …
The Organon of Medicine
by Samuel Hahnemann
,
I suggest you read it. You will be doing me a favour if you take it. Please,’ Clemens thrust the book forwards as he walked towards me.

I did not turn my head to watch him leave. But I heard the hollow sound of his
leather heels on the stone floor, and the protest of an opening door. I lowered my gaze from a wooden cross bearing a suffering, roughly painted china Jesus, to the book. Slowly, I opened the front cover and stared at Clemens’s elaborate calligraphy, noticing his home address in Prussia, and further down in print, that the volume was first published in 1810.