by Tom Reiss
The doctor finally arrived, accompanied by an entourage of Holy Faith officials and escorted by twelve armed soldiers. General Manscourt “could not help but declare his indignation” and demanded that everyone leave the room. Some of the soldiers did leave, and the physician approached. Dumas recognized the man who had been treating him over the past week for the paralysis in his cheeks.
“Upon seeing me the doctor became as pale as death,” Dumas recalled. He noticed a look of embarrassment on the man’s face, as if he hadn’t expected to be confronting this particular patient alive again. Dumas then became convinced that the doctor “was the instrument of the crime, if not the author.”
The doctor told Dumas to remain lying down and to drink icy cold water, and hastily left. The servant prepared a glass, but “the little that I took of the iced drink made me feel like I would die if I went on, so I abandoned it to take up my previous treatments once again.” More lemon juice, olive oil, and enemas. The doctor returned some time later and prescribed a series of regimens that included blistering and “ear injections that [for a time] caused complete deafness” (again, standard practices of the era, though medical research had already shown by the 1770s that ear injections caused deafness).
His medical treatment over the following two weeks, Dumas would reflect, “left me in no doubt that they intended to poison me to death.” General Manscourt, too, experienced a sudden and frightening ailment—in his case in the form of rapidly escalating violent headaches that “reached the point of attacking his brain,” as General Dumas later put it—and “he could be brought out of that state only by means of a quick bloodletting and a great number of enemas and drinks that I made him myself before our own eyes” (a precaution to make sure they would not be poisoned).
DUMAS had no doubt the doctor was trying to kill them both by every means at his disposal, except the obvious one of slitting their throats. But it is not so easy to determine whether the doctor’s “perverse regimens” should be attributed to evil intentions or simply standard medical practice of the time. After all, Dumas attributed his own salvation to the “forty enemas in three hours.” Though the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century had created great interest in the natural sciences and in medicine, this had not yet translated into an understanding of disease. (Some doctors even argued that the very qualities of the Enlightenment itself—urbanity, refined manners, too much reading and introspection—caused disease.) Instead an individual’s constitutional idiosyncrasies were minutely scrutinized, so a doctor could develop a highly personalized cure to treat the patient more than the disease. It was the ultimate in “personal attention” from a primary care provider—though not perhaps with the benefits we now assume come from that relationship. Molière’s observation from the previous century still applied: “Nearly all men die of their remedies and not of their illnesses.”
Two of the doctors who visited Dumas believed that his symptoms—the loss of hearing and vision, the paralysis in his face, the excruciating stomach pain—were signs of melancholia (i.e., depression). Reading this diagnosis in their reports, I thought, “How modern!” But in fact there was a well-established belief in the eighteenth century that depression was the cause of everything from infections to heart disease and cancer.
Although the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had officially repudiated it, the age-old theory of humors still formed the basis of medical common sense in the late eighteenth century. In the humoral paradigm, there was a continuum between health and illness on which each individual found him- or herself at any given time. At the bottom of every person’s condition lay the balance among his or her humors—mysterious bodily substances that determined well-being: too much of one or too little of another caused either disease or the “putrefaction” of the entire organism. Many treatments of the age—sweating, purging, bleeding, emesis—were designed around this basic premise.
Aside from his declining physical condition, Dumas found what he thought was more evidence that his doctor was trying to do him in: it came to light one afternoon when he was taking a bath and the physician visited him for a chat while he sat naked in the tub. The doctor said he wanted to speak to General Dumas while they had absolute privacy, “to tell me that he was sure that we were going to have everything stolen, like our compatriots [e.g., Dolomieu before his departure for Messina], and he wanted us to entrust him with our most valuable remaining things to be returned to us on our departure. I noted from my bath that this man was not avoiding being seen or heard by an artilleryman named Samarrou.” The doctor made no real effort at secrecy, Dumas wrote, “despite his air of trying to establish conspiracy between us.” (Dumas’s description of his captivity feels almost hallucinatory at this point, and it is unclear what he thought the conspiracy was about, except keeping him in a state of weakness and dependency that he was determined to avoid.)
Though he did not pinpoint any sort of poison in his own food or medicine, Dumas believed he’d found the source of Manscourt’s brain malady one day when he examined his snuffbox: someone appeared to have mixed a kind of metallic powder into the snuff which was “so corrosive that it had eaten several holes in the box.”
The final event that made Dumas suspect the doctor was, ironically, that a few days later the doctor himself suddenly dropped dead. From this Dumas concluded that the doctor had been poisoned by the “very same authors of my poisoning” and that it had been “without doubt a precaution to avoid it going public.”
Dumas’s persistent fretting over his failing health and the treatment he received—he devotes dozens of pages in his report to the tragicomedy of the long gaps between doctors’ visits and the bloody and ineffective “cures” when they did show up—compounded his paranoia that he was being assassinated by degrees by unknown authors for unknown reasons. Adding to his grim mood, the day after the doctor’s sudden death Dumas woke to find his goat strangled—an accident, said the guards, though Dumas was certain “the animal was killed in the fear that it could still be useful to me.”
OVER the next two months, whether or not he was being poisoned, the conditions in the damp fortress took a further toll on Dumas’s health. He wrote letters to the French government, to the king of Naples, and home to Marie-Louise and his little Louise Alexandrine. The prison governor evidently took the letters, but there is no evidence that they were ever delivered (he mentioned these lost letters in a later missive). Dumas became blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and continued to suffer from facial paralysis.
Finally Dumas had no choice but to ask for medical attention once again, as hazardous as that must have seemed. But this time he was sent a doctor who spoke French fluently and who told him frankly how harmful his previous treatments had been; he prescribed entirely new ones. Every doctor measured an individual’s humoral imbalance differently, after all. This doctor diagnosed Dumas’s illness as being caused chiefly by melancholia and prescribed “injections into my ears,” a powder blown into his eyes, and half an ounce of cream of tartar, “a regimen that far from relieving me only aggravated the terrible state of my stomach.”
But this doctor was very friendly, and “visited me regularly enough for a month and took all opportunities to lead into political conversation by affecting a lot of patriotism and friendship for the French in order to win my trust.” The chance to hear news and opinions in his native language was a precious thing for a man in captivity far from home. Along the way, his deafness was alleviated. But suddenly one day the governor ordered that the doctor no longer come because he might inadvertently disclose secrets, and because the jailers could not monitor their conversations since they did not speak French. Dumas suspected a new trick, one in which the doctor had been a willing participant: to make him drop his guard and develop an attachment—then to remove it and further break his will.
The governor later relented, but on two conditions: the doctor must not communicate with Dumas in his native tongue, and the governor himself must be
present during examinations. When the doctor arrived, Dumas heard him admonished icily by the governor before the cell door was unbolted: “ ‘You are going to see your General Dumas. If you say one sole French word you are lost. You see this cell door? It will open and close on you for the last time.’ ” A French surgeon who accompanied them got the same warning.
“Everyone entered the room and crowded around me,” Dumas wrote. “I tried to make eye contact with the surgeon,” but he looked away. “I spoke to the doctor, but he remained silent.” After a brief discussion in which the French surgeon was both intimidated by the governor’s threats and hobbled by his difficulty understanding the Italian language, he
recommended that I return to my original course of treatment, adding new blistering on the arms and the nape of the neck and behind both ears—this violent regimen, more than all the other pernicious drugs made up in pills, made such ravages upon me that over the month I followed it I endured perpetual insomnia and an abundant and continuous loss of sperm, resulting in the total slackening of all parts of my body and an affliction like that of a man not far from death.†
AT this point, Dumas received a message from the world outside the dungeon that probably saved his life. The Friends of the French at Taranto—the local republican patriot underground—“knowing the traumas I’d suffered secretly passed me two volumes of The Country Doctor by Tissot.” (In fact, Tissot never published a book with this title; the book was most likely Tissot’s Health Advice for the Common People, published in two volumes, with eleven editions between 1761 and 1792.)
Just as it is hard to overstate the power of communication from the outside world on a prisoner, it is hard to convey the power of a volume of Tissot for a sick man in 1799. Samuel-Auguste Tissot was a lion of eighteenth-century medicine—the Louis Pasteur of humoral imbalance. Published over a thirty-year period from the 1750s to the 1780s, Tissot’s works were used by doctors, surgeons, midwives, healers of all sorts, and patients.‡ In a world in which a printed book was a valuable object, Dumas was suddenly holding the full force of contemporary medical knowledge in his hand. Someone on the outside wanted him to live!
Paging feverishly through his Tissot, Dumas came across something even more remarkable: the article on poison was marked and underlined. It was a message, and it confirmed all his suspicions. From then on, Dumas continued to accept all the pills the doctor gave him, but he only pretended to take them. Instead, he put them aside, carefully wrapped, planning to have them analyzed in the future. “I was quite pleased to have some material evidence of the villainy of the agents of the king of Naples,” Dumas wrote. He now had a new will to live, to leave the fortress of Taranto alive, hoping the pills would “one day demonstrate to the French government all the darkness of my murderers.”
A few nights later another package came from the underground Friends of the French—this one arriving through the window of Dumas’s cell on a string that lowered it to the floor. It was a large chunk of chocolate, wrapped in plain paper, along with some kind of medicinal herb. Chocolate was not a mere treat in those days—like sugar, it was one of the wonder drugs in the eighteenth-century arsenal. The herb turned out to be cinchona, the bark of a tropical tree containing quinine, considered to have great healing properties for fevers and nervous conditions.
“I owe a marked improvement,” Dumas wrote, “to the cinchona and the chocolate that the humane patriots clandestinely passed me by means of a string and a hook during the night.” He added, however, that these “courteous acts” could not prevent his becoming deaf in the left ear, paralyzed in the right cheek, from having his right eye practically lost, and from suffering terrible headaches and permanent buzzing in the ears.
The year 1800 brought new, pragmatic reasons to show leniency toward French prisoners, for by that summer everyone in Taranto—prisoners, guards, Holy Faith Army, and secret republicans alike—must have known something of the great events then going on in the north, where the French had launched a second invasion of Italy. Napoleon had left the government in Paris to personally lead the campaign. As if atoning for the tawdriness of his coup d’état and his assumption of dictatorial powers, the first consul had mounted his horse and led his armies through the Saint Bernard Pass, the scene of one of Dumas’s greatest military triumphs, and down again into the Italian plain. (Actually, Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule, though his propaganda experts carefully disguised the fact.)
The second Italian campaign, capped by a magnificent victory over the Austrians at Marengo on June 14, utterly reversed the French rout of 1799. By the fall, Italy seemed once again on its way to becoming the laboratory of revolutionary nation-building, the main outpost for “French ideas” beyond France’s borders. Once more the Italians were raising all their various tricolor flags and planting trees of liberty. It is impossible to know for sure how much of this news was reaching the prisoners. But Dumas’s captors no doubt sensed that the balance of power was shifting beneath their feet and that tricolor flags might soon be the order of the day in Taranto as well.
Dumas learned that he and Manscourt and some other prisoners were to be moved from Taranto to another fortress—at Brindisi, on the Adriatic. He was informed that the move concealed an assassination plot: “only on the day of the transfer did some people come by our window, and from their gestures we understood that we were to be torn from Taranto and killed en route.” That night, around 11 p.m., the bolts on his door were drawn and the Marquis de la Schiava (president of the province of Lecce) “burst into our rooms” followed by men armed with swords and daggers. They told the prisoners that they were leaving for Brindisi and that Dumas was to pack his things immediately. The manner of the marquis’s entry—in the dead of night, with so many armed men—left Dumas in no doubt about his real intentions. “I expressed my strong disapproval of such an indecent manner to the marquis at the top of my voice,” Dumas wrote. “The marquis responded by drawing his sword.”
Dumas at that point grabbed his old walking stick, the closest thing to a weapon in the cell, and brandished it against the marquis’s sword and all the other steel in the room. He did not think much of his chances for success, but he was prepared to make a stand, no matter how futile. Dumas must have retained something of his old talent for intimidating opponents. Judging from a subsequent written complaint from “the Ministry of State and War” about Dumas’s “recklessness” and “threatening behavior” when the guards came to get him, his militant defense was apparently effective. After a brief standoff, the guards retreated from the cell.
At this point Dumas’s hallucinatory fury clearly made him suspect only the worst from his captors. But in fact when he and Manscourt were transferred to a fortress in Brindisi, in September 1800—about a day’s ride away—far from being killed en route, their situation actually improved dramatically. In this fortress overlooking the Adriatic, Dumas fell into regular conversations with a priest. The man’s name was Bonaventura Certezza, and apparently he and Dumas developed a real friendship. The only record that survives is a poignant letter the priest wrote to Dumas after he’d gotten out of prison: “Let it be known to you, my dearest General, that I have always kept and always will keep my feelings [of esteem for you] alive in my soul and [they] obligate me to pay my respect to you forever. In fact, I have left no stone unturned to try and obtain news of you. I know that hearing praise annoys you, but, knowing your warm heart, I dare to speak this way. I wish I could embrace you, damned distance, I speak with my heart on my sleeve.” The priest promises not to talk so much if Dumas comes to visit him at his house, where he is always welcome.
There is far more evidence of Dumas’s amusing if testy relationship with a prison officer named Giovanni Bianchi, who was a kind of regional commander of all the southern Neapolitan prison fortresses. They corresponded constantly starting in September 1800, even though Bianchi appears to have been based in the Brindisi fortress itself, at least much of the time. (Manscourt was presumably accorded similar
ly courteous treatment, but he largely drops out of Dumas’s account until after they were liberated.) Bianchi’s letters, elegantly addressed to “Gentlemen, French Generals, Prisoners in the Fort by the sea,” relay the news that Dumas’s requests for food, clothing, and basic supplies—an iron cooking pot, for example, which was the subject of a tortuously minute exchange—were now being passed up the chain of command, all the way to King Ferdinand himself. Good news, Bianchi informs him: the king has approved! That a request for a cooking pot could be passed up the chain of command to the king tells one everything one needs to know about the Kingdom of Naples … except perhaps for the important detail that, as Bianchi regrets to inform Dumas, it would be “some time” before the king’s approval could be acted on “at the local level.” Hence, still no cooking pot.
Thus began a picayune exchange of letters in which Bianchi asks the general for things like sketches of his shoes and precise quantities of kindling to be used per day. (This is the first mention that the prisoners were allowed to make fires.) I imagine prisoner and jailer, at opposite corners of this medieval fortress, each at a wooden table—one huge and polished, the other small and rough—dipping his quill into ink and preparing his requests or excuses in equally elaborate swirls.
On October 31, 1800, Bianchi asks Dumas to verify “the number of jackets, shoes, shirts and other items you need, with the corresponding prices. I ask that you send [the list] to me immediately so that it can be verified by the Kingdom’s Ministry of Finance.” Bianchi arranged for shoemakers and tailors to come to the prison, as well as carpenters, though Dumas had to continue to find things to trade or sell to pay for these services. He also had to pay for food and for wood to burn in his stove.
