by Perrat, Liza
There was a priest, but it wasn’t Père Joffroy. Enrobed in purple and gold, this other priest stood at his iron lectern like a great master of ceremony, shouting words I couldn’t understand.
I tried to concentrate on the Holy Scriptures. If I could focus on the scriptures, everything would be all right. Things would be back to normal. I recited the prayers, and I sang of the glory of God, though I could barely recall the words.
My eyes were drawn upwards, beyond the cold blue light that filtered through a high window, to another light. It was the shade of a lemon, and thin as the eye of a needle. I squinted, trying to see it more clearly, not even certain it was truly there. I shut my eyes for a second and when I opened them again, the slice of light was gone.
***
‘Health may only be restored through a harmony of blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile,’ the keepers said, as they strapped me to the stool. ‘This will balance your body fluids and restore your humour.’
They began to spin the stool. ‘We must rearrange your brain, put it all back right.’ Faster and faster, they turned me. The room flashed by. I was giddy, and bursting from the stool, about to hurtle off and slam into a wall.
‘No, stop, please!’
They kept spinning me. My gut lurched and heaved, and when they finally stopped, I clutched my aching head, leaned over and threw my bread up on the putrid floor.
The keepers hurled a bucket of water over me, and the vomit, their sneers as icy as the water.
‘Pitié, pitié!’ I cried, knowing what was coming next — what always came after the spinning stool. My pleas went unheard, and they cocked their lancet device, the trigger firing the spring-driven blade into my veins.
Once they finished taking my bad blood, the blows began.
‘Too much black bile,’ they said, hitting me over and over. ‘Have to beat it out of you.’
I didn’t fight; I no longer even flinched, for I was dead, again.
21
Hymn music clanged through the dawn gloom of the chapel, mauve threads of incense smoke twisting up into the cool air. I sang along with the others, my gaze, as always, pulled up to that distant slice of lemon light — an instant of peace through my daily Hell.
The needle-eye light had brightened these past days, and with its glow I’d become conscious of the passing of time, and the daily rhythm of Mass, prayers, bloodletting, enemas, spinning stool.
The fog cleared a little more each day. It swirled upwards, away from me, and from the great oval window of the chapel, that lemony scythe of light spread its warmth through my body.
This morning, the light shone so brightly its glare almost blinded me. I blinked into it, beginning to take hold of the tangled threads of my mind; to weave those unwieldy knots into neater, more purposeful tresses. My lips formed words, then sentences, and I no longer felt the terrible, sharp panic as when I’d arrived at la Salpêtrière; the crushing fright that had made me sweat and scream and tear at my shaven skull.
***
‘Why do they shave our heads?’ I asked the pock-faced woman, the only one who spoke to me, or made the slightest bit of sense.
‘For the vermin, ma chère,’ she said. ‘And they say the wet compresses they use to calm our madness work better on the naked skull.’
‘You don’t seem mad,’ I said.
‘I might be as mad as the next woman here, but there are plenty of reasons besides insanity to get you thrown in the dungeons.’
‘Dungeons?’
She nodded. ‘Les cachots of la Salpêtrière. Most feared dungeons of them all.’
La Salpêtrière.
From my days at the house in Saint-Germain, I’d heard gruesome stories of la Salpêtrière, and the peculiar warmth of the chapel light burned like a fireball now — a lightning bolt that struck me and left me breathless and dizzy. I finally understood I was imprisoned in the largest and most feared asylum of them all. For what reason though, I had no idea.
At once, my self-awareness became an appalling curse. I wanted to drop onto the dirty straw and scream out my frustration, but I could no longer cry, though the tears choked me as I shivered in that dismal tomb of madness.
‘Why do they put us in here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, for any reason,’ the pock-faced woman said. ‘Protestants refusing to convert, women reading horoscopes, taking lovers, practising divination, or throwing stones at royal coaches. And, naturally, general madness.’
‘How long have I been here, in the dungeons?’
‘A month, possibly. You’ve done well. Most who enter les cachots never come out alive.’
I was thankful I had little recollection of that month. ‘But why ever should I be sent here?’
‘They say you murdered your children … you went mad and drowned them in a river.’
‘Drowned my children!’ I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head like the lunatic they took me for.
The jade green ribbon of river curled between the willows. The shrill songs of birds drowned out the noise of the current and the sough of the breeze. Like new lambs on shaky legs, Blandine and Gustave wobbled towards the water’s edge.
‘Come back, come back!’ I shouted, running towards them, but as I reached them, it all faded to blackness, then nothing.
‘I don’t know.’ I tapped the side of my head. ‘It’s gone.’
My memories of the misery were not gone though. I recalled how it had crept low in the beginning, so stealthily I hadn’t seen it coming. Then it gained on me little by little and, when it was too late, possessed me.
I heard again the demon voices, whispers at first then screeches so loud I wanted to beat my head to get them out. I understood the madness had reduced me to little more than a flaccid, palpitating corpse, no longer commanding any power of thought or reason.
‘I suppose I must have been truly insane, for a time,’ I said, and while I felt my normal self, there still remained much of which I had no recollection. Something had gouged that terrible day on the riverbank with Blandine and Gustave from my mind.
‘Perhaps it would’ve been better to stay mad?’ I said to the pock-faced woman. ‘So mad I wouldn’t hear these poor wretches muttering nonsense and moaning.’
Surely it would be easier not to see their eyes too — as wide and soulless as felled deer, and to watch them clasping their palms in prayer to a deaf God.
***
As a lucid woman, the keepers’ “treatments” seemed more barbaric, and for their entertainment rather than our recovery.
I quickly understood the spring-driven lancet was only one of the horrifying devices they used to bloodlet me, but I no longer cried out as the scarificator blades slashed my skin in a mosaic of shallow slits. I said nothing as they drained my blood into a cup. I did not retch on the stench-laden fug of their breath that could have extinguished a candle. I was silent, crumpling to the floor in foetal submission as they beat me, and enclosed me for a time in a solitary confinement box into which the waters of the Seine River rose.
I thought of writing to my friend, Claudine. She would know what to do, or perhaps Léon, or my brother, but in those dreaded cachots, we were barely able to get bread, soup and water to survive, let alone ink or paper.
***
Most of the rich Parisians who visited la Salpêtrière in their glamorous carriages with liveried footmen came purely for entertainment, but I sensed many of them also feared us “crazies” — that long-popular equation of mental illness and demonical possession.
Oh yes, those same wealthy people who’d once hired me as a wet-nurse, paid the keepers handsomely for the pleasure of ridiculing me — the freak.
‘Here they come again,’ the pock-faced woman said. ‘Their special Sunday afternoon outing, after feasts of … of what?’ She stared at me. ‘I cannot remember. It’s an age since I have eaten anything besides bread and soup.’
‘Oysters?’ I said. ‘Lamb and green peas, and maybe strawberries?’ My mouth was moist with memo
ries of Claudine’s kitchen.
Through the barred grid, I watched the keepers lead their guests across the courtyard of the Insane Quarter of the asylum. Their pockets jangling with louis d’or coins, the keepers pointed out to the visitors where they could peer in at us, through the bars.
I recoiled as a man in a beaver fur hat waved his sword, lace frothing from his wrists and neck. Another in a powdered wig poked his cane at me and sneered. The swish of his cape washed cold air over me, and I felt like a monkey in some macabre circus act.
‘Come, Jean-Henri,’ a woman in a fur-trimmed cloak and fluffy handmuffs said to the sword-waver, her tight ringlets bobbing under her veil. In a dour cold that gripped me tighter than my shackles, I envied the woman her velvet cloak, her full skirt and the lingering smell of her perfume that vied for airspace with the shit and vomit of la Salpêtrière.
The handsome couple moved away, the man swinging his cape, the woman’s steps delicate in gem-encrusted slippers. I imagined them stepping into their decorated carriage, the horses clomping daintily off, leaving the asylum far behind.
Our visitors gone, I stared around me, at all those sent here for treatment — the beggars, prostitutes, epileptics, Jews, Protestants, criminals and the thieves; at the presumed witches, magicians, bohemians and idiots. Those women would never recover, but simply die slow, horrific deaths.
I gnawed on my hard bread, thinking of those visitors pausing at a café on their way home for brandy, sorbet or candied fruit, and I felt the surge of fury again; the injustice of it all.
I closed my eyes to the women’s vacuous stares, a murmur coming from some distant corner of my rearranged mind.
How dare they keep me trapped in their web of human misery? I did not deserve to be here. Like these women, I could succumb and die. Or I could fight it.
As I finished the last of my soup and crumbs of bread, I pledged to myself I would not perish in the filth of this asylum. I would flee la Salpêtrière. Somehow I’d get back to Lucie, to my brother, my daughter, and to Léon.
22
I held my breath and clenched my buttocks to still my quivering body. I dared not move, nor utter a sound, under the frosty stare of Sister Superior.
The woman took her goose-feather plume and lowered her gaze to the register that, from what I could make out, recorded every detail of life in la Salpêtrière — its rules and punishments, garments and food allotted, animals maintained, vegetables harvested, personnel employed.
‘Name: Charpentier, Victoire Athénaïs, widow of Armand Bruyère, merchant and innkeeper,’ Sister Superior read in a grim monotone. ‘Date of entry to la Salpêtrière Insane Quarter: 8 September, 1785. Age: 23 years. Condition: Alienism of la Frénésie type caused by too much moral sensitivity, the listlessness of deep grief, and an imbalance of bile humour. Medical Observations: The effect of this humour has bogged the patient’s intestines by slowing down excretions and drying out the brain.’
Sister Superior barely took a breath and her voice never wavered. ‘Usual treatment performed on patient for six weeks: copious bloodletting from the feet to the temporal artery. Leeches applied to the anus. Purges, ice baths, spinning stool. Balms applied to the shaven head. Medical Observations: patient appears to have responded to treatment and regained lucidity. Recognises own name.’
She paused, meeting my eyes again as if searching for lingering madness.
Ink flickering across the page, she wrote and read at the same time: ‘Date of transfer to Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière — 1 November, 1785. To be held there for life for the crime of murder. Condition: Alienism, diminished to the mild mélancolie type.’
Transfer to prison! I could barely stifle my gasp. ‘But, but, Sister Superior, am I not to be sent home? I don’t recall any murder. There has been some mistak — ’
‘The prisoner will not speak.’ The glacial eyes didn’t blink, nor move from mine. ‘Otherwise I’ll have no choice but to remove her back to the dungeons.’
I clasped my hands, holding them close to my heaving breast. Sister Superior kept writing. My pulse racing, I looked down at the register again, trying to understand, and to find the mistake. There must be one, somewhere.
It was difficult to read upside-down, but it looked like a list of the different asylum dormitories, each bearing the name of a saint — Sainte-Anne: 107 cantankerous old women with canker sores. Sainte-Catherine: 87 deformed girls. Sainte-Magdeleine: 48 epileptics. Les Cachots: 84 violent, crazy women. Logis: 100 incurably insane women and girls. Long lists of women coming from all over the country, it seemed. A shudder bristled through me as I read, in many of the final columns, “suicide” or “death”.
‘I note you, widow Bruyère, have no particular skills in weaving, spinning, embroidery or lacework,’ Sister Superior said, jolting me from my horrified daze. ‘As a former innkeeper, you shall thus provide your cooking services to the community of la Salpêtrière.’
She kept on talking, never raising nor lowering her voice; never blinking.
‘Nourishment shall be given, as to all prisoners, by soup, bread and water. You will be allotted a blouse, a dress, stockings and a bonnet every eight days. You are to wear your own clogs.’
I had no choice but to bow in submissive assent. ‘If I hear the slightest complaint about your kitchen work, or if you fail to remain silent outside the daily hour permitted for talk, you shall be taken from your cell, chained by the neck to a wooden beam and whipped. You will remain in that upright position for one whole day. If this bad behaviour continues, you will be returned to the dungeon.’
Not the dungeon. Never could I survive another day in such a living tomb. I could hardly believe I’d survived almost two months there. In my weakened state, I felt faint, my legs threatening to fold beneath me.
I said nothing and bowed to Sister Superior, who nodded to two keepers standing by the door.
The keepers hustled me across the icy cobblestones, gripping me so tightly my arms went numb.
‘Please, you’re hurting me.’ I tried to twist away, but they held me tighter.
‘Think you’re lucky to escape the dungeons, do you, my lovely?’ The keeper sneered. ‘Those cachots that make ordinary folk tremble?’
‘She mightn’t think herself so lucky once she gets to the Prison Quarter, eh?’ the other said with a cackle. They hustled me to walk faster and I stumbled, and fell to the cobblestones, which grazed my face.
After perhaps ten minutes, we reached a building as gloomy as all the others, besides the dungeons, for which there were no words.
‘Here we are,’ the keeper said. ‘The Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière — your new home.’
‘But you forget,’ the other one said. ‘She needs her flower — our pretty fleur-de-lys reserved for murderesses.’
They sniggered as one pinned me down, the other, holding an iron, lurching at me. As the hot iron seared its lily flower pattern onto my left shoulder, the pain ripped the breath from me so that I couldn’t even scream, and I thought my heart would stop beating.
‘Off you go to the wolves now, my lovely,’ a keeper said, pulling me from the chair.
As they bundled me into a room, banged the heavy door shut and slid the bolts home, an icy rush scrambled down my back.
***
Clammy fingers pawed at the shoulders of my prison garb. I winced from the pain of the burn, taking in the vast dormitory in the scant light from a high dormer window.
‘Welcome, Victoire. I’m Agathe,’ a husky voice whispered close to me. ‘You need anything in here, you ask Agathe.’
Smallpox had ploughed the woman’s face into deep furrows, and robbed her of an eye. I shrank from her stale breath and the crusty sores that spotted her lips and oozed yellow liquid.
‘And we all know what the pretty emerald-eyed Victoire did to end up here, n’est-ce pas?’ Agathe winked at the group of women surrounding her, her smile mocking. ‘Poor drowned little mites.’
I opened my mouth but could
n’t think what to say. I tried to recoil from Agathe’s moist touch; from the foulness that made my gut heave, but the sharp curves of the woman’s nails held me still, and punctured my skin.
I shut my eyes to rid my mind of them, but all I saw was the river flowing faster, higher, the heads of Blandine and Gustave bobbing on puckers of current like flower heads the wind had ripped from their stalks.
‘S’pose we all got our reasons for doing what we do,’ Agathe went on. ‘I myself had the bad luck to marry a gambling drunkard, Victoire. Had to chop him up with his own axe in the end.’ Her throaty laugh was snug with phlegm.
With a ragged nail, Agathe began tracing my lily-flower branding.
‘Hah, truly one of us!’ Her fingertips moved slowly, dipping into the hollow below my shoulder, and following the rise of my breast down to the stippled skin. She grabbed my nipple and twisted.
I cried out and tried to run, but there was nowhere to go, and the stink of the inmates rose as they pawed at me and clung feebly to my dress. I wrapped my arms around myself, choking on my sobs.
‘Aw, no need to cry, pretty thing.’ Agathe was at my side again. ‘Come and meet my friends.’ She pointed out two tall women. ‘Catherine and Marguerite. They’re poisoners, here for life, like you. And here is sweet Toinette, a freethinker, swindler and cheat.’ Agathe raked her mouth into a horrible grin as she pointed out Marie-Françoise. ‘A knife-wielding blasphemer, and over there is Julie, our little gypsy girl and money forger.’
‘Sleep, you whores!’ a sister officer shouted from the corridor. ‘Bedtime!’
Bedtime? I gazed about me, at the fifty or sixty inmates. I counted only six straw mattresses.
Agathe laughed. ‘How many sous you got for me, Victoire? Most expensive bed is next to the window. No money, no bed.’
‘Silence!’ the sister officer shrieked through the spy hole. ‘Next one who makes a sound goes in with the crazies.’
I had no choice but to huddle on the damp straw covering the ground with the other luckless ones without beds. The cold bit at my hands and feet as I lay, crowded in with all those women, yet the pain of solitude wrenched at me as if I were the sole occupant.
