The Green Muse (8 page)

“What do you think of Paul?” she asked at last, very quietly.

“He is like a ruined monument,” I said after a moment. “He has no dignity. But he has something—­something almost like grandeur. I pity him, and I have to say that he disgusts me. Anything that I pity disgusts me. But there is a spark there, an intimation of the man he once was, the man who threw over his whole life for a beggar boy who came to his door with a sheaf of poems in his hand. I do not despise that weakness in a man, although I find it grotesque. It is religion that destroyed Verlaine, not vice. If he had been able to rise above guilt, what a life he would have lived! And now he whores himself and calls it repentance. Guilt is the real evil. The man who can conquer guilt can conquer the world!”

“I think he is exalted,” V said. “I think he has finally found his heaven.”

“How could you think that?”

“He has wanted nothing more for twenty years than to pay for what he perceives to be his sins. Well, he pays for them every night. He is steeped in the very degradation he abhors. He is in the very hell he has always dreaded. He is happy, Charles.”

All I noticed was that she had said my name.

We had walked to the river. There was a wind, and occasionally I would smell that musk-­and-­roses scent from V's hair. Most women's hair smells of quinine, which they rub on it more or less frequently; many women seldom actually wash their hair. V's hair looked like a cloud around her head, as if escaping. I was unused to hair that did not stick, slicked down, to the scalp, and I found it enchanting. There was also something about her smell: Women often carry flowers to hide their ordinary bodily scent, but it seemed that what I smelled
was
V's body. It was intoxicating. It smelled primal and pure at the same time. Its raw intimacy made me think of the skin at the nape of her neck as I had seen it outside the Morgue, and I thought I would go mad. But I merely stood next to her and stared into the current.

The water of the Seine had an evil reputation. It is polluted by nearby graveyards, and offal of every description is emptied into it. But its beauty is not dimmed on a moonlit night, and the wind was blowing strong. I used it as an excuse to move closer to her.

“I must go now,” she said.

“You must stay.”

We were looking out at the moving current and the light on the current, not at each other. We spoke as if our lines were rehearsed and we did not mean them at all. I felt bewitched; I did not know what she felt.

“It is time,” she said.

“Will I see you again?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “at the Morgue.”

“I would like to see you there,” I said, and suddenly my hands were around her neck. I caressed her skin as I removed her scarlet silk scarf, and she let me. She looked at me with a doll's dead eyes, and yet I knew that she was not afraid. I was afraid of her.

She was looking at me steadily. My hands found their grip upon her neck. I pressed. The voluptuousness of the sensation was like the voluptuousness of walking through the field of flowers that was not there. I was not sure if I was really doing this, squeezing the life out of this woman that I knew I loved.

V leaned her head back, leaned her neck into my hands. She closed her eyes, and her mouth twitched for an instant into a smile. She wanted to know what I was capable of. Perhaps she thought me amusing. I looked beyond her to the water, which did not care whether she lived or died. The moon came out from behind a cloud and gave her a silver halo. I wanted to throw her down and possess her upon the dirty stone pavement. I wanted to release her and ask her to be my wife. I wanted to press the life out of her and leave her here, a testament to my power.

She sighed, that was all.

I
GOT HOME
late. My boots were muddy, and so was the hem of my coat. I had lost a glove. They say cobwebs are good for cuts; I ran my right hand through the wheel of dust at the corner of the landing on my way up to our apartments. Theo snored; something I have never mentioned to him. He would be crushed by so ignominious a betrayal on the part of his body. I was thinking very clearly, although I was exhausted; Leonard slept silently, like a plant. I fell across my bed with my clothes still on and did not wake or dream till morning.

 

Dearest Natalie:

It is such a pleasure, after a long and trying day, to come back to my bachelor apartment and write my weekly letter to my most precious little sister. I have intended since you were a child that when you were grown you would be my most intimate confidant, and now that I am in Paris and you are yet home in our small town I have found in you the friend and inspiration I have long sought fruitlessly in the outer world. Oh, Natalie, this world is cold! And it is not the dead who are most cold, the dead I photograph for their loved ones or for the police. Just yesterday I was called upon to photograph the scene of a murder. I will not enumerate for you the horrors of the tenement yard where I found the body of a young woman lying amid shadows and offal.

Sometimes Paris is the saddest city in the world.

The woman was young, though not so young as you, and she was blond, and wore a black bolero jacket in the latest style. I had to move her fair hair to photograph her face. I felt that I became intimate with her then, as though I touched her spirit in the curtain of her hair. And I was moved. Today I felt a need I had never felt before, to go to the public Morgue and view the body. The young woman had been found with no identification of any kind, and, as is customary with such cases, her body was set up for display at the Morgue so that the citizenry could come and see if she could be recognized.

The Morgue is a horrible place, Natalie. I may have mentioned it before. It is vast and airy, and when I went in there were children running about as though it were a park, and a woman with a dog on a leash! But I am getting ahead of myself: First I had to wait in line for thirty-­five minutes. They say ten thousand came to see her that day; somehow I am ashamed; when I saw her I wanted to protect her, to take her away from all those alien eyes. But again I have gotten ahead of my story.

I stood in line outside the Morgue at ten on a Thursday morning and felt as though I were waiting for a carnival to begin. Already there were several hundred ­people ahead of me, some of whom had obviously come up from the country for the day, complete with lunches in huge covered baskets that could be smelled fifteen feet away. There is something about the smell of sausage, Natalie, that will always bring back the memory of the cow in the churchyard that morning so long ago!

There was the most astonishing cross section of Parisian society on display that morning. The country bumpkins were directly behind a group of sophisticated men speaking quite heatedly on the implications of the Social Darwinism, now so popular in England, for the medical and social establishment here on the Continent. There were shopgirls, and young men from the lyceums, and families, Natalie, with little children. I cannot imagine what reason a mother would have for bringing her child to see the dead. Of course death is the fitting end to all our aspirations; it is our rest and our reward. We all know this. And to familiarize a child early with the outward manifestations of death is no harmful thing; quite the contrary. But to subject the innocent soul to the sight of a woman brutalized by murder! The modern sensibility seems capable of accepting almost anything, Natalie; anything at all, no matter how grotesque. Judging from the crowd, I could almost say, the more grotesque the better.

There was no loveliness left to her, sitting there at the bare wooden table behind the glass. There had been some loveliness left in the dawn light on the courtyard floor. Here she looked like a clown, a harlequin who might at any moment dance.

As I stood there sad, I heard a familiar voice. “Edouard, my dear man, this is not the lady's funeral!”

It was Robert Richet, a photographer working at the Hôpital Salpêtrière. I had met him, as I'm sure I have told you, two years ago at one of the lectures I attend Thursday nights at the Lyceum: “Photography and the Modern Manifestations of Light.”

Richet is an educated man, sardonic, a wonderful raconteur; he keeps himself at a distance with his humor. I greeted him warmly. I do not have many friends in this huge, impersonal metropolis: It is as though we each go our own way, cogs in some great machine the use of which we do not know.

“You look as though you knew this lady intimately, my dear Edouard,” said Richet. Friends keep me from thoughts such as these.

I did, I told him, in a way. He was terribly interested; I do not believe he had ever thought about police photography. We spoke for several minutes, about technique mostly, lighting and suchlike. I had to ask Richet to move away from the window, as we were beginning to anger the crowd behind us by lingering too long, and I was ever more saddened as I stood in front of my poor unknown lady. We moved into a corner and watched the crowd as we talked. Oh, Natalie, there is nothing like talk! It freshens the soul, and mine was parched that day. Richet spoke to me about Dr. Charcot, the head of La Salpêtrière. Now, Dr. Charcot is a great man, Natalie. He is studying something you ought to learn something about, so I shall essay to teach you. You know that the members of your sex are prone to hysteria and all of its attendant horrors. You remember Adelaide Blanchot, of course, whose parents own the butcher shop in town? You were too young to be told the full details of her confinement, but I will tell you now, as it has bearing not only on what Richet and I spoke of but on all that happened after.

Adelaide, as you know, was an extremely sensitive girl. She read a great many romantic novels and kept a voluminous diary that she let no one read. She wrote poetry, and had hopes of one day being a published writer. None of these things is in itself dangerous, but the combination proved an insidious erosion to her health. She won a poetry contest, and one of her poems was printed in the women's section of a local newspaper. She began a correspondence with a young man who claimed to have been smitten with her poetry and, hence, with her. She felt that she was at last living the exotic life her romantic novels had led her to believe was possible for young ladies of her station. She fed her imagination with unrealistic dreams, and when the time came to fulfill them her woman's nature was not strong enough to bear the weight of their reality. She grew pale, and her skin took on a greenish hue. She became temperamental. She argued with her parents.

Her parents took her to a local doctor, who diagnosed green disease. This is a very dangerous thing, Natalie, and very common in girls your age. Thank heavens you have good common sense and a natural love of the domestic arts! Books are dangerous things in the hands of women; it has been proven so time and time again. You will make some man a good wife, dear sister, as you make me a good confidant.

But back to Adelaide. (I know how often you have chided me for making a point when I should be telling a story.)

Her parents were at their wits' end. The girl spent a great deal of her day crying in her room. The correspondence with the young man was terminated, of course, as well as the poetry writing, and the diary had been confiscated. Oh, the horrors the mother found in that diary! The impieties, the ungrateful spitefulness! Apparently Adelaide and the young man had actually met! She stole out from under her mother's eye to go to him on the train. It was to have been accomplished again within the month; it is by the grace of God that the mother found out in time.

Her attitude toward her mother became more and more defiant, her moods more and more despondent. At last she attempted suicide, using her mother's laudanum, and her parents were left with no choice. I was very friendly with her older brother, as you remember, so I was privy to the details of this sordid story.

At any rate, it turns out that Adelaide is now confined in the very Hôpital Salpêtrière at which Richet works. He does not know this; at any rate I did not ask him. I do not know if she is still there, as this was some two years ago. She may well be; it was a difficult case.

Upon confinement Adelaide was given the water treatment; that is, she was strapped into a specialized tub and had water in varying temperatures dripped or poured over her as was deemed necessary. This cure has proven very effective in cases of green disease, which is really simple hysteria in the young woman. Of course she was kept very quiet, in complete solitude, as is best for a woman, except for her hydrotherapy treatments and daily exercise walks in the courtyard; when a man suffers from a depressed state it is appropriate for him to be kept busy, to be encouraged to spend a great deal of time outdoors, to engage in athletics. A woman, on the other hand, is to be kept as still as possible, with little stimulation from visitors and no distractions such as books or letters.

I have told you about the details of Adelaide's case because the subject has direct bearing both on my conversation with Richet and the extraordinary opportunity that has become open to me because of it.

He and I retired to a café a few blocks from the Morgue, as we had tired of the crowd. We ordered luncheon, and Richet told me of his latest work. When I first met him, he was working as a portrait photographer, mostly for young society girls. The work paid well, but it was not stimulating enough for a man of Richet's sensibilities. He is a poet as well as a photographer, a collector of rare wines and Oriental sculpture. He was languishing in his day-­to-­day existence; there is only so long a man can tolerate a routine that goes against the grain of his natural proclivities.

And then one day he attended a lecture by the great Dr. Jean-­Martin Charcot. Dr. Charcot is something of a legend here in Paris, Natalie, I could almost say something of a god. La Salpêtrière, as you know, is the famous women's mental sanitarium founded by Louis XIV on the former site of a gunpowder factory. For many years it housed beggars, petty criminals, and prostitutes as well as the mentally ill. In our century it became solely an asylum for the insane. Although some real improvements were made to lessen the horrors of life there, when Dr. Charcot became its director, in 1863, it was still a sinkhole of madness, a desperate place. Women roamed the courtyards dressed in tattered clothing and received no treatment. Here was no effort to cure the insane, only to house them, albeit in better conditions than those to which they had formerly been accustomed.

Dr. Charcot changed all that. He is a neurologist, that is, a physician of the brain, and he knows more about the ills of the human spirit than anyone else on earth. His particular passion is to find and understand the physical causes of hysteria, in men as well as women. He is doing great work in the world: He is working to prove that hysteria is caused not merely by circumstance and emotional disposition but by actual physical lesions on the brain.

I have heard a great deal about Dr. Charcot's hysterics. At his Tuesday afternoon lectures women are brought forward, women who are strangers to him. He puts them into an hypnotic state, at which time he watches them perform certain acts of hysteria, certain reenactments of the hysterical story, as it were. Richet is one of the photographers who records these sessions, and the glorious news, Natalie, is that another photographer is needed, and my friend is quite willing to put forth my name to the great doctor himself! He assures me there will be no objection, that his recommendation will be enough to assure me the position. Oh, Natalie, think of the opportunity! I who have photographed the dead, the dying, and the vainly self-­aware, am to have the opportunity to photograph a new subject, Life itself, as it were, as it has never been seen before. And I will be able to quit my work at the tintype studio.

I will let you know when my assignment starts. Until then, dear sister, keep up your studies, and keep sending me the lovely little things you knit. And don't forget you promised me a violet ribbon from your hair that I may carry in my wallet, close to my heart.

Your affectionate brother,

Edouard