The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  He then asked for leave and went to Paris, in the belief that the affair would be hushed up. But signed letters continued to appear in the Morells’ house. Some claimed that Marie was pregnant, others that her parents would soon both be murdered, and so on. The Baron had had enough. La Ronciere was arrested.

  The number of circumstances in the accused’s favor was so large that we can hardly believe today that he should have been brought to trial, let alone convicted. To begin with, it was common knowledge in Saumur that Marie had been piqued by La Ronciere’s obvious admiration for her handsome mother, of whom the daughter was extremely envious. Then the Morell mansion was surrounded by sentries on the night of the attempted rape; not one had noticed anything untoward, even though the bedroom concerned was on the top floor and reachable only by a ladder it would have required at least three men to carry and “mount”—therefore a ladder that would have left traces in the soft soil beneath the window… and the defense established that there had been none. Furthermore, the glazier brought in to mend the pane broken by the intruder testified that all the broken glass had fallen outside the house and that it was in any case impossible to reach the window catch through the small aperture made. Then the defense asked why during the assault Marie had never once cried for help; why the light-sleeping Miss Allen had not been woken by the scuffling; why she and Marie then went back to sleep without waking Madame de Morell, who slept through the whole incident on the floor below; why the thigh wound was not examined until months after the incident (and was then pronounced to be a light scratch, now fully healed); why Marie went to a ball only two evenings later and led a perfectly normal life until the arrest was finally made—when she promptly had a nervous breakdown (again, the defense showed that it was far from the first in her young life); how the letters could still appear in the house, even when the penniless La Ronciere was in jail awaiting trial; why any poison-pen letter-writer in his senses should not only not disguise his writing (which was easily copiable) but sign his name; why the letters showed an accuracy of spelling and grammar (students of French will be pleased to know that La Ronciere invariably forgot to make his past participles agree) conspicuously absent from genuine correspondence produced for comparison; why twice he even failed to spell his own name correctly; why the incriminating letters appeared to be written on paper—the greatest contemporary authority witnessed as much—identical to a sheaf found in Marie’s escritoire. Why and why and why, in short. As a final doubt, the defense also pointed out that a similar series of letters had been found previously in the Morells’ Paris house, and at a time when La Ronciere was on the other side of the world, doing service in Cayenne.

  But the ultimate injustice at the trial (attended by Hugo, Balzac and George Sand among many other celebrities) was the court’s refusal to allow any cross-examination of the prosecution’s principal witness: Marie de Morell. She gave her evidence in a cool and composed manner; but the president of the court, under the cannon-muzzle eyes of the Baron and an imposing phalanx of distinguished relations, decided that her “modesty” and her “weak nervous state” forbade further interrogation.

  La Ronciere was found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Almost every eminent jurist in Europe protested, but in vain. We can see why he was condemned, or rather, by what he was condemned: by social prestige, by the myth of the pure-minded virgin, by psychological ignorance, by a society in full reaction from the pernicious notions of freedom disseminated by the French Revolution.

  But now let me translate the pages that the doctor had marked. They come from the Observations Medico-psychologiques of a Dr. Karl Matthaei, a well-known German physician of his time, written in support of an abortive appeal against the La Ronciere verdict. Matthaei had already had the intelligence to write down the dates on which the more obscene letters, culminating in the attempted rape, had occurred. They fell into a clear monthly—or menstrual—pattern. After analyzing the evidence brought before the court, the Herr Doktor proceeds, in a somewhat moralistic tone, to explain the mental illness we today call hysteria—the assumption, that is, of symptoms of disease or disability in order to gain the attention and sympathy of others: a neurosis or psychosis almost invariably caused, as we now know, by sexual repression.

  If I glance back over my long career as a doctor, I recall many incidents of which girls have been the heroines, although their participation seemed for long impossible…

  Some forty years ago, I had among my patients the family of a lieutenant-general of cavalry. He had a small property some six miles from the town where he was in garrison, and he lived there, riding into town when his duties called. He had an exceptionally pretty daughter of sixteen years’ age. She wished fervently that her father lived in the town. Her exact reasons were never discovered, but no doubt she wished to have the company of the officers and the pleasures of society there. To get her way, she chose a highly criminal procedure: she set fire to the country home. A wing of it was burned to the ground. It was rebuilt. New attempts at arson were made: and one day once again part of the house went up in flames. No less than thirty attempts at arson were committed subsequently. However nearly one came upon the arsonist, his identity was never discovered. Many people were apprehended and interrogated. The one person who was never suspected was that beautiful young innocent daughter. Several years passed; and then finally she was caught in the act; and condemned to life imprisonment in a house of correction.

  In a large German city, a charming young girl of a distinguished family found her pleasure in sending anonymous letters whose purpose was to break up a recent happy marriage. She also spread vicious scandals concerning another young lady, widely admired for her talents and therefore an object of envy. These letters continued for several years. No shadow of suspicion fell on the authoress, though many other people were accused. At last she gave herself away, and was accused, and confessed to her crime… She served a long sentence in prison for her evil.

  Again, at the very time and in this very place where I write, [7] the police are investigating a similar affair…

  It may be objected that Marie de Morell would not have inflicted pain on herself to attain her ends. But her suffering was very slight compared to that in other cases from the annals of medicine. Here are some very remarkable instances.

  Professor Herholdt of Copenhagen knew an attractive young woman of excellent education and well-to-do parents. He, like many of his colleagues, was completely deceived by her. She applied the greatest skill and perseverance to her deceits, and over a course of several years. She even tortured herself in the most atrocious manner. She plunged some hundreds of needles into the flesh of various parts of her body: and when inflammation or suppuration had set in she had them removed by incision. She refused to urinate and had her urine removed each morning by means of a catheter. She herself introduced air into her bladder, which escaped when the instrument was inserted. For a year and a half she rested dumb and without movement, refused food, pretended spasms, fainting fits, and so on. Before her tricks were discovered, several famous doctors, some from abroad, examined her and were horror-struck to see such suffering. Her unhappy story was in all the newspapers, and no one doubted the authenticity of her case. Finally, in 1826, the truth was discovered. The sole motives of this clever fraud (cette adroite trompeuse) were to become an object of admiration and astonishment to men, and to make a fool of the most learned, famous and perceptive of them. The history of this case, so important from the psychological point of view, may be found in Herholdt: Notes on the illness of Rachel Hertz between 1807 and 1826.

  At Luneburg, a mother and daughter hit on a scheme whose aim was to draw a lucrative sympathy upon themselves—a scheme they pursued to the end with an appalling determination. The daughter complained of unbearable pain in one breast, lamented and wept, sought the help of the professions, tried all their remedies. The pain continued; a cancer was suspected. She herself elected without hesitation to have the breast extirpa
ted; it was found to be perfectly healthy. Some years later, when sympathy for her had lessened, she took up her old role. The other breast was removed, and was found to be as healthy as the first. When once again sympathy began to dry up, she complained of pain in the hand. She wanted that too to be amputated. But suspicion was aroused. She was sent to hospital, accused of false pretenses, and finally dispatched to prison.

  Lentin, in his Supplement to a practical knowledge of medicine (Hanover, 1798) tells this story, of which he was a witness. From a girl of no great age were drawn, by the medium of forceps after previous incision of the bladder and its neck, no less than one hundred and four stones in ten months. The girl herself introduced the stones into her bladder, even though the subsequent operations caused her great loss of blood and atrocious pain. Before this, she had had vomiting, convulsions and violent symptoms of many kinds. She showed a rare skill in her deceptions.

  After such examples, which it would be easy to extend, who would say that it is impossible for a girl, in order to attain a desired end, to inflict pain upon herself? [8]

  Those latter pages were the first Charles read. They came as a brutal shock to him, for he had no idea that such perversions existed—and in the pure and sacred sex. Nor, of course, could he see mental illness of the hysteric kind for what it is: a pitiable striving for love and security. He turned to the beginning of the account of the trial and soon found himself drawn fatally on into that. I need hardly say that he identified himself almost at once with the miserable Emile de La Ronciere; and towards the end of the trial he came upon a date that sent a shiver down his spine. The day that other French lieutenant was condemned was the very same day that Charles had come into the world. For a moment, in that silent Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.

  He had never felt less free.

  And he had never felt less sleepy. He looked at his watch. It lacked ten minutes of four o’clock. All was peace now outside. The storm had passed. Charles opened a window and breathed in the cold but clean spring air. Stars twinkled faintly overhead, innocently, disclaiming influence, either sinister or beneficent. And where was she? Awake also, a mile or two away, in some dark woodland darkness.

  The effects of the cobbler and Grogan’s brandy had long worn off, leaving Charles only with a profound sense of guilt. He thought he recalled a malice in the Irish doctor’s eyes, a storing-up of this fatuous London gentleman’s troubles that would soon be whispered and retailed all over Lyme. Was it not notorious that his race could not keep a secret?

  How puerile, how undignified his behavior had been! He had lost not only Winsyatt that previous day, but all his self-respect. Even that last phrase was a tautology; he had, quite simply, lost respect for everything he knew. Life was a pit in Bedlam. Behind the most innocent faces lurked the vilest iniquities. He was Sir Galahad shown Guinevere to be a whore.

  To stop the futile brooding—if only he could act!—he picked up the fatal book and read again some of the passages in Matthaei’s paper on hysteria. He saw fewer parallels now with Sarah’s conduct. His guilt began to attach itself to its proper object. He tried to recollect her face, things she had said, the expression in her eyes as she had said them; but he could not grasp her. Yet it came to him that he knew her better, perhaps, than any other human being did. That account of their meetings he had given Grogan… that he could remember, and almost word for word. Had he not, in his anxiety to hide his own real feelings, misled Grogan? Exaggerated her strangeness? Not honestly passed on what she had actually said?

  Had he not condemned her to avoid condemning himself?

  Endlessly he paced his sitting room, searching his soul and his hurt pride. Suppose she was what she had represented herself to be—a sinner, certainly, but also a woman of exceptional courage, refusing to turn her back on her sin? And now finally weakened in her terrible battle with her past and crying for help?

  Why had he allowed Grogan to judge her for him?

  Because he was more concerned to save appearances than his own soul. Because he had no more free will than an ammonite. Because he was a Pontius Pilate, a worse than he, not only condoning the crucifixion but encouraging, nay, even causing—did not all spring from that second meeting, when she had wanted to leave, but had had discussion of her situation forced upon her?—the events that now led to its execution.

  He opened the window again. Two hours had passed since he had first done so. Now a faint light spread from the east. He stared up at the paling stars.

  Destiny.

  Those eyes.

  Abruptly he turned.

  If he met Grogan, he met him. His conscience must explain his disobedience. He went into his bedroom. And there, with an outward sour gravity reflecting the inward, self-awed and indecipherable determination he had come to, he began to change his clothes.

  29

  For a breeze of morning moves,

  And the planet of Love is on high…

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  It is a part of special prudence never to do anything because one has an inclination to do it; but because it is one’s duty, or is reasonable.

  Matthew Arnold, Notebooks (1868)

  The sun was just redly leaving the insubstantial dove-gray waves of the hills behind the Chesil Bank when Charles, not dressed in the clothes but with all the facial expression of an undertaker’s mute, left the doors of the White Lion. The sky was without cloud, washed pure by the previous night’s storm and of a deliciously tender and ethereal blue; the air as sharp as lemon-juice, yet as clean and cleansing. If you get up at such an hour in Lyme today you will have the town to yourself. Charles, in that earlier-rising age, was not quite so fortunate; but the people who were about had that pleasant lack of social pretension, that primeval classlessness of dawn population: simple people setting about their day’s work. One or two bade Charles a cheery greeting; and got very peremptory nods and curt raisings of the ashplant in return. He would rather have seen a few symbolic corpses littering the streets than those bright faces; and he was glad when he left the town behind him and entered the lane to the Undercliff.

  But his gloom (and a self-suspicion I have concealed, that his decision was really based more on the old sheepstealer’s adage, on a dangerous despair, than on the nobler movings of his conscience) had an even poorer time of it there; the quick walking sent a flood of warmth through him, a warmth from inside complemented by the warmth from without brought by the sun’s rays. It seemed strangely distinct, this undefiled dawn sun. It had almost a smell, as of warm stone, a sharp dust of photons streaming down through space. Each grass-blade was pearled with vapor. On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously religious about them, but of a religion before religion; a druid balm, a green sweetness over all… and such an infinity of greens, some almost black in the further recesses of the foliage; from the most intense emerald to the palest pomona. A fox crossed his path and strangely for a moment stared, as if Charles was the intruder; and then a little later, with an uncanny similarity, with the same divine assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up from its browsing; and stared in its small majesty before quietly turning tail and slipping away into the thickets. There is a painting by Pisanello in the National Gallery that catches exactly such a moment: St. Hubert in an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Nature’s profound-est secret: the universal parity of existence.

  It was not only these two animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were dense with singing birds-blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons, filling that windless dawn with the serenity of evening; yet without any of its sadness, its elegaic quality. Charles felt him
self walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world. He stopped a moment, so struck was he by this sense of an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed, each unique. A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat—a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what I am, thou shall not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello’s saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world’s existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place—and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles’s previous hours and places—seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appalling ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren’s triumphant throat.

  It seemed to announce a far deeper and stranger reality than the pseudo-Linnaean one that Charles had sensed on the beach that earlier morning—perhaps nothing more original than a priority of existence over death, of the individual over the species, of ecology over classification. We take such priorities for granted today; and we cannot imagine the hostile implications to Charles of the obscure message the wren was announcing. For it was less a profounder reality he seemed to see than universal chaos, looming behind the fragile structure of human order.

  There was a more immediate bitterness in this natural eucharist, since Charles felt in all ways excommunicated. He was shut out, all paradise lost. Again, he was like Sarah—he could stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and only envy the wren its ecstasy.