Trials of Passion (29 page)

For the period's best-known neurological researcher and clinician, Jean-Martin Charcot, and his team at the vast Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, priests and the occult were part of the same spectrum of suggestive charlatanry as the ‘healing' animal magnetizers and popular amateur hypnotists, whose public spectacles, like those of ‘Saint Bernadette' at Lourdes, drew vast crowds – not unlike today's mindreading magicians or television pastors. Their influence needed to be kept at bay.

Charcot's scientific fame extended not only across the Channel to England, but also across the Atlantic to the United States and east to Vienna, from where a young Freud came to study with him and later translated his work. In France, that fame was veritable celebrity: before the age of television medics, the ‘Napoleon of the Neuroses' could be spotted in a crowd. His public lectures at the Salpêtrière – where his
hysterics were diagnosed, in part through their susceptibility to hypnosis, and taken through the signs and manifestations of their condition of
grande hystérie
– were attended by
le tout Paris.
The spectacle of a scantily clothed, hypnotized hysteric moving a limb paralysed just moments before, or being prodded with a needle without responding to the sensation, or enacting a post-hypnotic suggestion, could easily vie with any drama at the theatre. It might even equal that other kind of reality spectacle, the courtroom.

Depicted and studied via the new quasi-scientific technology of the camera, Charcot and his team's hysterics (a significant proportion of whom were men, though being of that gender and working-class, they had less celebrity appeal) provided images to equal illustrations of music-hall stars and dancers, and women wielding revolvers or vitriol. Any of these might appear side by side in street hoardings advertising newspapers, magazines or spectacles. Charcot was a rigorous clinician who had cast light on a number of important neurological diseases: until late in his career, he was convinced that
la grande hystérie
was due to brain lesion and not to any psychological factors. The traumá his hysterics had often suffered, he long held, had had a neurophysiological impact on their brains – which pathologists also studied in the Salpêtrière laboratory. Whatever the scientific ‘seriousness' attributed to the Salpêtrière team, Charcot and his investigations had a high popularity rating.

Already in 1883
Le Figaro
had devoted much of the front page of one of its issues to a scathing article about ‘the great doctor who is Napoleon's look-alike' under the less than respectful headline ‘Cabotinage', or ‘Hamming It Up'. The gist is that Charcot – on the point of being admitted to the elite Académie des Sciences – has perfectly understood his times, recognizing that this is the era of medicine – not of the red and black of soldiering and priesthood, or even of the law. No, this is the epoch of the medic, in other words that scientist who can ‘act' on women. Charcot, the anonymous
Figaro
writer notes, has studied the great contemporary malady hysteria, and it took him only a very few years to attain popular fame.
Although back in 1878 the
Dictionnaire des contemporains
, the
Who's Who
of the time, didn't even mention his name, by dint of setting up his students in professorships around the country, by popularizing such concepts as ‘cerebral localization' and by displaying nude women in the phases of the hysterical attack to such luminaries as the great actress Sarah Bernhardt – indeed, by surprising the men and frightening the women – he has monopolized hysteria and swayed public emotion.

The conservative
Figaro's
criticism of Charcot is based on his atheistic ungodliness. In the process, however, the paper initiates readers into his medical theatre, describes the fetching half-clothed phases of hysterical hypnotism: from the insensate catalepsy with its rigid physiology-deifying postures; the swooning lethargy, the obedient somnambulism, as well as the contortions of a major hysteric attack –
d la
Charcot – from the arc, to the
attitudes passionnelles,
to
clownisme
and the final orgiastic laughter. The writer evokes the hypnotic sound of Charcot's voice and likens it to Dante's Virgil leading us all into the Inferno.

Such articles helped to popularize and also trivialize what the medics were doing: in the process they made hysteria and hypnotic suggestion exciting, available to imitation, as well as frightening. They also offered categories of explanation and argument to the courts, where the debate about hysteria, consciousness, criminal responsibility and hypnotic suggestion took on a different kind of public prominence.

In 1884 Jules Liégeois, a professor of law from Nancy, argued in an influential and much contested speech to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences that any person put into a somnambulistic state becomes in the hands of the experimenter a ‘pure automaton both physically and psychologically'. It follows that crimes can be committed in a state of hypnotic suggestion.

Liégeois was a follower of Nancy's most famous doctor, Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919), chief of the Nancy faculty of medicine. Bernheim was a one-time student of Charcot's, but a generalist rather than a specialist in nervous diseases. He had been influenced by the saintly
Ambroise Liébault, a local philanthropist, who had been curing the poor with hypnotic treatments since the 1860s. In turn, Bernheim practised a therapeutic hypnotism which seemed to better a wide variety of ills and had nothing, as far as he was concerned, to do with hysteria. Most people, he declared, were hypnotizable. The Nancy school was thus at loggerheads with Charcot and his followers and their view that susceptibility to hypnosis was a sign of hysteria and that hypnotism had no uses outside of the diagnostic one. Charcot, like his most famous disciple Gilles de laTourette, did not believe, for instance, that a person under hypnosis could undertake a crime he wouldn't undertake in a conscious state. The only ‘crime' that a person might be led to commit in a condition of hypnotized lethargy – where complete unconsciousness coincided with muscular relaxation, and no memory followed – was the ‘crime' of succumbing to rape: women's control here was, in any event, unreliable. Enter a whole new way of approaching woman's sexuality and assessing her virtue.

23.
Hypnotic Murders 1: The Chambige Affair

The Chambige trial brought the debate about the powers of hypnotism to a wide public, amongst whom leading intellectuals and writers featured. The case raised troubling questions about the nature of female desire and maternal virtue; how the first could override the second. Because the murderer was a young man of refined talent and nervous sensibility, the whole affair also cast a disturbing spotlight on what seemed to be a new kind of individual – neurasthenic rebels against the bourgeois order for whom death and murder took on aesthetic rather than moral dimensions.

On 25 January 1888 in his family's stately villa in the town of Sidi Mabrouk, the twenty-two-year-old Henri Chambige, studying psychology in Paris and spending the summer with his mother in his native Algeria, was found wounded and in a state of disarray. He had shot himself through the mouth, and two bullets were lodged in his cheeks. In front of him on a bed lay a half-naked woman with a peaceful expression on her face. In fact she was dead, two neat bullets through her temple. When the doctor lifted her eyelids it was to encounter an expression of such ecstatic happiness that she looked magnetized.

The woman was Magdeleine Grille, a pretty, upright and Protestant thirty-year-old, devoted mother of two and wife of a prominent citizen of the region. Two explanations were given for the crime scene and the drama it conjured. The first came from Chambige, who wouldn't allow himself to be torn from Magdeleine's presence when officers attempted to do so. He was a literary young man who had written subtly on the Goncourts and Modernism, and whose poetic imagination was peopled by figures of romantic despair. According to Chambige, he and Magdeleine were passionately in love: she had
proposed that she become his mistress and then, so as not to be dishonoured, since they couldn't live together, they would engage in a double suicide. Yes, he had killed her, though it was she who had held the gun to her temple for the first bullet at least. But he had failed in killing himself, and he begged those who had arrived on the scene to do it for him. He even attempted to grab the medical instruments being used to suture his face. A suicide note asking his mother to forgive him and to remember him to his best friend was found next to Magdeleine's neatly folded clothes.

Magdeleine Grille's family, known and respected in the Constantine area, did not accept Chambige's view of their near one's death. Her husband, a handsome, well established and much liked inspector of mines, claimed that his wife, a good and beautiful woman, beloved by everyone, had even sometimes complained of the boy's presence. In the trial, the family acted as civil plaintiffs and contended that a nervous and impressionable Magdeleine Grille had been hypnotized by Chambige, lured by his gaze to his house, perhaps drugged, and then raped. She had always talked of Chambige as a young madman. He had never spent any time completely alone with her before. He was imagining it all and had murdered the poor woman, after having hypnotized and raped her, since she was the only witness to his machinations and didn't return his love.

Ever since she had lost her little son, a nervous and mourning Magdeleine had been interested in hypnotism, her husband and mother attested. She had read tracts on suggestion. She borrowed one from Chambige, who lived only a ten-minute ride away. She had suffered a fainting spell while watching displays of hypnotism given by a troup of Arab travellers. She could go into a sleep state instantaneously, under the influence of unknown forces. She had told a friend that although she couldn't stand the radiance of Chambige's gaze, she was fascinated by it. So powerful was it, that only after he had gone back to Paris could she pull herself together.

The family's lawyer, Ludovic Trarieux, was intent on establishing Madame Grille's irreproachable honour. He himself was an eminent
député
, who later founded the League for the Rights of Man. He argued
that Madame Grille had resisted Chambige's advances on that fatal afternoon, so he had hypnotized her in the way that the experiments at the Salpêtrière exemplified. The crime scene showed no signs of any struggle: every item of her clothing, even the buttons, were intact. So she must have fallen into a cataleptic state under hypnotic influence, after which Chambige had undressed her and twice had his way with her. Her doctor testified that her expression was certainly not that of a suicide and had more in common with a magnetized state. Her husband, who upheld her honour absolutely, testified that she could have used her own money to go away with the younger man, if, as Chambige claimed, that were really what she had wished. Their departure had been foiled because Chambige couldn't come up with funds, yet she had two thousand francs in her desk. Nor had she packed anything. On the stand, Chambige refused to contest Monsieur Grille's view of things. He embraced his guilt, wanting only the death he had failed to inflict on himself.

The
Figaro's
own Albert Bataille reported on the case as well as on the trial, which began on 8 November 1888. Debate raged from Algeria to Paris and beyond. Bataille's reports contained long extracts from Chambige's jail diary, a remarkable document, at once prison writing and romantic confessional, which formed part of the instruction. When it was later published in book form it was prefaced by the famous novelist Paul Bourget (a writer the youthful Proust admired), who wrote a novel inspired by the Chambige affair,
Le Disciple
(1889). On the stand, Chambige, according to Bataille, was a captivating, indeed hypnotic, defendant. His speech was superior even to his pen, while his telling of his tragic tale, punctuated by weeping and trembling of hands, was deeply moving and felt utterly sincere. The love story Chambige evoked on the witness stand, between a nervous, hypersensitive student and a tenderly kind older woman, his much mourned sister's closest friend, had echoes of any number of fictions. When on his second summer in Constantine he had whispered to Madame Grille that he loved her, she had responded, ‘Let us love each other like brother and sister', but it was then that she kissed him for the first time.

Towards the end of the trial the eminent novelist Anatole France covered the case in
Le Temps
, while the influential Maurice Barres evoked Chambige's ‘sensibility' in the
Figaro
. Like so many artists fascinated since the Romantic movement by criminals, who seemed, like them, to be exceptional beings, France and Barrès were tantalized by the young Chambige. Here were criminality and talent in one – a perfect example of the decadence then coming into vogue, and often inmixed with a transgressive sexuality.

A melancholic, whose father had committed suicide out of an unshakeable sense of the horrors of the world, the young Chambige, according to France, had written a brilliant unfinished novel, ‘The Infinite Dispersal of the Heart', which he had read out loud to his riveted student friends. ‘
C'était un malade et un orgueilleux
,' France cites the prosecution as saying, and draws the time's preferred image of the artist as sick, troubled and proud. Chambige's prison memoir, France writes, shows his progression from a sensitive, chaste, pious, scrupulous and anxious youth of sixteen to a young man whom confrontations with reality had filled with despair, turning him into a ‘living tomb', trapped in eradicable mourning for his innocent childhood. Embracing the period's fashionable tropes, this young Chambige states with nihilistic aplomb, ‘Even more than women, I loved lies.'

Chambige's early nihilism stemmed from a lost faith in both God and love after a tawdry sexual encounter. With Madame Grille, he was reborn into innocence. They had both recently suffered terrible losses: his beloved sister, and her close friend, had just died, while Magdeleine had also recently lost her son. Both had talked to their friends of suicide, and both were brought to life again through their growing intimacy. A chaste tenderness saw them through one summer and then much of the next. She listened maternally to his outpourings and eventually also confided in him. At the end of the first summer, she gave him a lock of her hair and her photograph. They vowed themselves to a pure love, not unlike that between Julien Sorel and Madame de Rênal in Stendhal's
The Red and the Black.
Like that love, theirs became fatal once it acquired an obsessive cast.