Paris Requiem (16 page)

Her gaze floated back to him. ‘I will tell you. Why not? Though it is a long story.’ She settled back in her chair, her dress rustling in the quiet of the room.

‘It dates back to, ’92, no, ’93, just before the great Charcot’s death. You know of Jean-Martin Charcot, then our foremost neurologist? A formidable man. He ran the Salpêtrière Hospital and he turned that madhouse for the poor and deranged into what he named a museum of living pathology. He gave public lectures – demonstrations, really, in what he called
his clinico-anatomic method – a mixture of careful clinical observation of patients and an investigation into the
physiological
abnormalities which precipitated their condition. And they were terrible conditions – tics and strange walks and anaesthesias and paralyses and ravings.’ She paused. ‘Am I boring you?’

‘No, not at all.’ James was only astonished that a lady might be interested in such things. ‘Please continue.’

‘Well, Charcot held his demonstrations in a large
amphitheatre
at the Salpêtrière every Friday. They were open to the public. I think, everything else apart, he wanted to show us that these strange diseases were not the product of gods and demons and wicked spirits. They were not punishments or possessions or portents, but painful illnesses eventually as treatable by medical science as any other.

‘In any case, I went along to a few of his lectures. I was riveted. He was a wonderful performer and the setting was almost like a theatre. Bright lights illuminated the stage. He would have assistants with him and patients, sometimes a man, but more usually a woman or two who were suffering from hysteria and he would hypnotise them and demonstrate the various phases their illness went through. First he would have his assistants touch the women in a particularly sensitive, what he called a hysterogenic, zone, which brought on the attack. They might foam at the mouth or immediately fall into a deep, a cataleptic sleep. He would then suggest certain things to them and under this hypnosis, it was extraordinary what they would do. I saw one woman completely convinced that a top hat was her baby. She rocked it, kissed it.

‘This first stage was followed by a stage of clownism, in which the patient went through impossible acrobatic
contortions
. Physical spasms, like the strange postures you see in that Breughel engraving of dancing mania. And finally came the
attitudes passionelles
in which the patient mimed scenes
and spoke of her life.’ She stopped. ‘You are looking at me oddly, Monsieur Norton. I shock you.’

James hadn’t realised he had reached for his pipe. He was somewhat taken aback by Marguerite’s enthusiasm, but he was also fascinated. He knew a little of what she spoke, but he had never seen it mimed so graphically. ‘No, please go on.’

Abruptly, she threw her head back and lifted her hands to the heavens as if she were addressing her lord and master. ‘This is how I first saw Judith Arnhem. I’ll never forget it. She seemed to be invoking God, speaking to him from the midst of her desperate passion. Then she raised her fist and shook it, like some female incarnation of Job. Her hair was flying, her face agonised. And she was speaking. It struck me as odd that Charcot didn’t listen at all to what she was saying, as if what mattered most was the dramatic pose she struck. But I listened. I was near the front that day and I could hear her mumblings clearly.

‘She was evoking a huge conflagration, the burning of a house, the terrible heat, a death, a horribly charred body. The details were so acute that I couldn’t believe these were simply mad ravings. And she chastised God. She tore at her hair. She said she wanted to die, to burn, too, to atone for her wrongs.’

Marguerite paused again.

‘Do go on, please,’ James urged.

‘Her pain was palpable,’ Marguerite murmured. ‘So I went to see her. Went the next day into the bowels of the hospital, not the new lecture theatre where I had the comfort of knowing a good number of the auditors, but into the midst of the pandemonium. It was both terrible and terrifying. And it was there I met Rachel Arnhem.’

‘She was an inmate,’ James breathed.

Marguerite shook her head. ‘No, no, I went to see Judith. It took me some time to find her. But I refused to be deterred. I had this innocent notion that I could help her in some way.
That I could alleviate her suffering. Rachel was with her. She was visiting. A frightened little girl, painfully thin with those vast tearful eyes, coming to visit her sister. My heart went out to both of them. It was only over the coming months that I was able to piece the story together.’

In a soft voice, her manner terse now as if the facts conveyed more than enough emotion, Marguerite went on to tell him about the tragedy that had struck and splintered the Arnhem household.

Like so many immigrant families, the Arnhem’s worked hard and all of them worked to make ends meet. After years of labouring for others, in 1890 they had amassed just enough funds to set up a small tailoring business of their own in premises outside their own lodgings. The father dealt with customers and cut the cloth and ironed, the mother and the girls sewed and looked after the younger children. They worked all hours and every day, taking in overspill from larger establishments, breaking only for the Sabbath, when this was possible.

On that Saturday late in the autumn of ’92, Judith, the eldest sister by three years, was meant to go into the shop to finish off an urgent piece of work. She refused. She was only eighteen and she wanted a break from the four bleak walls. There was a young man she was seeing. The father was angry. The work had to be done. Judith persisted and to create peace in the family, her mother said she would go in her place and finish the work in no time. It was only right that Judith should see her friend. Rachel could look after the little ones.

So the mother went off on her own. It was the last any of them saw of her alive. No one ever learned how it had happened, whether it was a gas lamp or a stray coal or a candle that started the conflagration, whether the mother in her exhaustion had fallen asleep over her work or been suffocated by smoke and fumes. Or indeed, whether some madman had
broken in to steal, had knocked her out and then started the fire. But it was Judith who was the first on the scene. She had seen her friend, and feeling remorseful, had decided to go to the shop and help her mother out if she hadn’t yet finished the work. It was late afternoon when she reached the shop. The flames were already high, brilliant against the night, an inferno the firemen were struggling to douse. She broke past them and rushed in, only to catch a glimpse of her mother’s charred body before a brave fireman dragged her out.

The family went to pieces after that. Arnhem blamed himself. He stopped working. He sat in a corner of the room beating his chest and staring interminably into space. What food there was came from the kindness of neighbours. Judith, too, was ravaged by guilt. She walked the streets in a kind of
desperate
trance. She was probably raped on one of these walks. In any event, she soon allowed herself to be raped for money. She brought the money home and put it on the table in front of her father. It was Rachel who picked it up and bought food for them all.

Then came Judith’s first suicide attempt. She slit her wrists. It woke Arnhem into action. He rushed her to a doctor. But the attempts continued, each more desperate than the last and Judith was unreachable, raving. Finally, at his wits’ end, frightened of the impact she was having on the little ones and on Rachel, he brought her to the Salpêtrière.

Madame de Landois’s voice had trailed off and they sat in silence as James tried to assimilate what – even in broad brush strokes – was a terrifying story. At last, though he sensed he was outstaying his welcome, he said, ‘How do you estimate the impact of all this on Rachel – on Olympe, I mean?’

Her abrupt laugh held a sob. ‘When I met her, Olympe was a child, but a child that had grown old before her time. She had supped too full of horrors, as your poet says. She was
very quiet, unnaturally quiet. Everything was written in her eyes, all her emotions imprisoned in her stiff little form. I thought if she spoke too much she might break. Not only into tears, but into pieces. I asked her on that first day whether she would like to come home with me to take tea, perhaps. On top of everything else she looked starved.

‘I had to convince her, woo her, but she came eventually. It was spring. We took tea in the orangerie and I had all kinds of cakes and biscuits placed before her. She just sat, like a large doll, and stared. Stared at everything – the garden, the trees, the piano, the food. She didn’t touch anything. She was
frightened
of me, too, I suspect. I was like a creature from a
different
planet.

‘I noticed that her eyes kept moving back to the piano and I asked her if she played. I was babbling, you see, saying anything that came into my mind, just to try and put her at her ease. She shook her head. But then a moment later she said what were almost her first words to me, her first question in any case. She said, ‘Do you?’

‘I nodded and for some reason I went to the piano and I started to play. A little Mozart sonatina, I think it was. And as I played, she began to move. She touched things. The tablecloth, the petal of a tulip, she cupped it in her hand. She brushed the sugar from a millefeuille and brought her
fingertip
to her mouth. It was as if she was coming to life. I played and played and watched her and felt a kind of wonder. Felt like I had never felt before in my life. When the hint of a smile touched her lips and eyes, I had the sense that it was the first real accomplishment of my life.

‘I stopped at last. I was aware that Olivier would soon be coming home. We still lived together then. And for some reason, I didn’t want him intruding on us. I guess I felt he would frighten her back into her shell. I asked her if she would like something to drink now. She looked at me a little dazed as if
she had forgotten my presence, but she nodded. And after we sat down, she said to me that she used to play. Play the violin, before … and she stopped. I pressed her a little, very gently and she told me it was before her mother died. I asked her whether she would like to come back the next day and play with me. I had a violin in the house. I had once played it, too. And no one here would object to our making as much music as we wanted. She said that she might.

‘I left it at that. I had all the tea things wrapped and told her she could take them home. She might feel hungrier later. Then I took her back in the carriage and said I would come and fetch her the next day at about two. If she felt like coming, she could.’

Marguerite paused. There were tears in her eyes. ‘And that I guess was the beginning of our friendship. It’s late, Monsieur Norton. We must both get some sleep.’

James gazed at her, hesitating, loathe to leave. ‘She was your Galatea,’ he said softly.

She smiled. ‘Perhaps. In a way. I certainly helped her find her new name. But that was some years later. First, she came back to make music with me. I was astonished at her talent. I didn’t know of her father’s then. Gradually, slowly, over the months, the story of her mother came out. One day I asked her whether she had a dream, a dream of something she would really like to do and she told me that before her death, her mother had taken her to the theatre as a birthday present and what she wanted, more than anything, though she knew it was impossible, was to be like one of those women. To act. So I set out to help her.’

Suddenly she covered her face with her hands. Her words were a stifled moan. ‘I had no premonition that …’ She rose and started to pace.

‘I’m so sorry,’ James heard himself saying. ‘So very sorry. You … you behaved wonderfully.’

She said nothing. She was wrapped in her own thoughts. He got up slowly. ‘May I presume to put one more question to you?’

She turned to him, a little bewildered, her eyes veiled in a sadness which only accentuated her beauty.

He looked away, suddenly uneasy with his question.

‘Do go on.’

‘I simply wanted to know when and how those episodes Olympe suffered from, the ones you mentioned to Arnhem, played themselves out.’

‘Decidedly you are no sentimentalist, Monsieur Norton. No, no, do not take offence. It is precisely what we need if we are to get to the bottom of this. Rachel, I call her that because she was not Olympe then, undertook, if that is the right word, most of her somnambulistic walking in the darkest months, just after her mother’s death. She would leave the house for, say the market, and two days later wake up in a village on the outskirts of Paris, altogether unaware of how she had arrived there.

‘Once, she went as far afield as Lyons, where she was picked up by a policeman and after long interrogation luckily
transported
back to Paris rather than to prison. Her shoes apparently were completely worn out. She didn’t know whether she had slept in fields or auberges or taken trains or walked all the way. It is truly astonishing and fortunate that nothing terrible happened to her – a girl alone like that.

‘There was only one episode after I met her. As far as I know, the illness then never recurred. Professeur Ponsard saw her a few times – the doctor I have recommended to Elinor.’ She paused. ‘When I got to know Rachel, I understood her ambulatory automatism as an altogether reasonable, though unreasoning, attempt to escape the horror that family life had become. It was one of the things her new life, her new
interests
helped her to overcome.’

‘But when I was here, you asked Monsieur Arnhem whether it might have happened again?’

‘You are truly a lawyer, Monsieur Norton. Nothing escapes you.’

‘Do please call me James. The hour is a little late for Monsieurs.’

She smiled. ‘And you will call me Marguerite.’

‘So, Marguerite,’ James took a certain relish in
pronouncing
the name aloud. ‘You thought that Olympe might have gone walking. Why?’

She shrugged. ‘I always worried, perhaps superstitiously, that if anything happened to reawaken those terrible days in Olympe, she might resort to the same strategies of escape. That was why I mentioned it. She always had a horror of fires – even the crackle from behind a fireguard.’