Leaving Van Gogh (8 page)

“There is a strange young man here today,” she told me on a warm day in April. “He goes everywhere, I hear, even the dormitories. He has a pad of paper, and he is drawing us! What do you think about this, Doctor?” she asked.

“It seems harmless,” I told her. “He is my friend, you know. I have known him for many years. He is called Monsieur Gautier.”

“But why is he here?”

“He came for the ball, a few weeks ago, with the art students. He was the Roman soldier. Were you there?”

Over the years, the
bal des folles
had also, oddly enough, become an informal tradition for the students of the École des Beaux-Arts. Every year a group of them dressed in elaborate costumes and arrived at the asylum to enliven the party. Gautier had borrowed the costume of a Roman soldier from the studio of his teacher, Cogniet. With its breastplate and red-plumed helmet, he would have been conspicuous in any group. But the costume also included a kind of short, pleated skirt covered with strips of leather. My friend’s strong, bare legs had been much admired.

“Oh, yes, I remember him, Doctor. We all do. But nobody knows why he has come back.”

“He is an artist, so he wants to draw the women here. He thinks he might like to do a painting of some of you. I asked Dr. Falret if he might visit. After the doctor spoke to him, he agreed to it.”

Laure’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand. We aren’t beautiful.”

“Perhaps you are beautiful in his eyes,” I suggested.

“He is certainly beautiful in ours!” She sniggered. “Don’t you remember that he was the king of the ball? The women loved seeing his legs! Now they will want to show him theirs!” She rocked with laughter, slapping her thigh. The coarse humor of a nurse? The lack of control of a madwoman? The former, I thought.

“Then no one will mind his presence here?”

“Oh, far from it, Doctor!” She chortled. “The more young men, the merrier.” She stood up to leave me. “They’re already calling him Jules César,” she said and walked away.

“Apparently they refer to you as Jules César,” I informed Gautier when he strolled into the courtyard a few minutes later. “Because of your costume for the ball. They voted you king for your legs.”

The remark would have made me blush, but Gautier was always difficult to embarrass. “So I’ve been told,” he said, sitting down next to me. “The patients see my legs as more of an advantage than Dr. Falret did.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Not in so many words. Just warned me about the general standards for behavior around here. He impressed upon me that these are women without inhibitions, not aware of what they’re saying. I didn’t really understand what he meant until one of them walked right up and kissed me. The doctor is wrong, they know exactly what they’re saying,” he protested. “I’ve been propositioned very explicitly twice, and I’ve only been here since noon.”

“Oh, yes, that’s the other thing. I was informed last week that this group of externs is disappointing. Not handsome enough. So you shouldn’t be proud, it’s only that they’re desperate.”

He looked me up and down theatrically. “Well, of course they are. Look at you!” He was quicker-witted than I was.

We sat silently for a few minutes, watching the women. There was a quality to their voices that I was trying to analyze, a kind of high timbre that made them sound more like children than grown women. I took out my notebook to write down some of the phrases I could make out: “Take it, take it!” called one woman, while another sang a bit of plainsong, perfectly.

Gautier had his portfolio on his knee, with a sheet of paper clipped to it. As if without thinking, he drew a few lines, and the space of the courtyard was suddenly defined on his page. A light vertical, the tree in the center. Two more lines, the path. I had seen him do this over and over again since he arrived in Paris three years earlier. Out of nothing, he conjured something. Though you knew it was just charcoal on paper, your eye accepted the illusion. A tree, a wall, a hat, a man, a bowl of fruit. He complained endlessly about the École des Beaux-Arts and the ceaseless repetitive drawing exercises that he considered useless, but I had known his work as a student back in Lille. He had improved immensely since then.

Now he began to rough in the figures. Laure and a friend were strolling up the walkway. An old woman, one of the
“restantes”
—a permanent patient who would live out her days at the Salpêtrière—was standing still in the sunlight, gabbling up at the sky and gesticulating with her hands raised. “Can you tell, by looking at them, the nature of their illness?” he asked, his eyes swinging between the patients and the paper.

“Sometimes,” I answered, watching his charcoal. My own notebook felt clumsy in my hands. “The one in the cloak,” I went on, “sitting on the ground, is a melancholiac. Always sad, lacking spirit, lacking energy. They turn in upon themselves. You often see them curled up like this,” I said, folding my arms to my chest and lifting my knees. “That one, over there, is another.” I pointed. “The woman with her face to the wall. She will remain there, immobile, until the wardress brings her inside.”

“Will she get better?”

“She won’t get worse.”

“And why does that woman have to wear a straitjacket?”

“She is what we call a
furieuse
. Normally they are housed in their own ward, but her madness has just recently become violent, so she is still with her usual companions. She may yet calm down, and we don’t like to move patients to different divisions unless it’s necessary. The
furieuses
have manic spells when they hit and scratch and shriek. They become dangerous to themselves and to others, so they must be restrained in the jackets.”

“And the one flouncing around with the imaginary fan?”

“What we call a monomaniac. She believes she is the Duchesse de Berry, and when she has delivered the heir to the throne, she will move to the Tuileries.”

“Don’t tell the emperor,” Gautier joked. “Does she know about any of it? About 1848?”

“We tell her. She doesn’t hear. She awaits her confinement steadfastly. She sometimes even begins labor. And here is the remarkable thing, Gautier—she has not had her monthly courses in years, and when her imaginary labor begins, her heartbeat rises and her stomach muscles actually contract. Look at the way she walks,” I added. She took slow steps, almost waddling, the hand without the fan at the small of her back.

“And don’t tell me, she’ll get better when there’s a Bourbon back on the throne?”

“We do our best,” I said sharply, turning to face Gautier. “There is much we don’t know. If you’re here to mock, you’re no better than the barbarians who used to jeer at the lunatics in chains.”

“No, no,” he said, in a soothing tone of voice, shading the melancholiac’s cloak. “You’re such a hothead, Gachet. I mean no disrespect. But you have to admit it’s funny. Walking around thinking she’s pregnant with the heir to the throne, two regimes ago.”

“I don’t agree,” I answered shortly.

“It’s not even funny that the regimes changed so quickly?”

“Least of all that. Listen, I cannot laugh at these women. There is so little separating them from us.”

He turned and looked me full in the face. “You always were very sensitive. I mean no disrespect.”

“But you find madness amusing,” I insisted, refusing to let it go.

He didn’t respond right away. Instead he sketched the old woman with the raised hands. It would have been easy to exaggerate her pose in order to mock her. A grimace here, a clenched hand there, and the women would look like hags, somehow less than human. But Gautier’s drawing did not put a distance between the observer and the observed. From the sketches he made at the hospital, he later created a painting called
The Madwomen of the Salpêtrière
, which was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon of 1857. People found his portrayal of my patients remarkably sympathetic.

“I don’t find madness amusing,” he finally said, “and I don’t find any of these individuals amusing. But I’m not trying to save them. That may be the difference between us.”

“No,” I admitted, “I can see that you aren’t laughing at them.” I gestured to his drawing. “It would show.”

“Well, then,” he said, teasing the page out from beneath the clip and sliding it into the portfolio. “You can stop protecting them from me, can’t you?” He got up quickly and was gone before I could formulate a response.

I sat there for a while longer, thinking about what he had said. Perhaps I did feel protective of the women, but that did not seem inappropriate. They were vulnerable. With Gautier, I was not worried about their physical welfare. Since he lived next door to me, I knew that he was currently occupied with both a hatter’s apprentice and a barmaid. Surely the two of them (each ignorant of the other) satisfied his lust and delight in intrigue.

I perceived a different kind of vulnerability in the madwomen. Gautier had come close to it when he mentioned the women’s propositions to him. “They know exactly what they’re saying,” he’d insisted, contradicting Dr. Falret’s assertion. Perhaps both men were right, or neither was. Perhaps the madwomen expressed their truest thoughts, regardless of the audience. They had lost sight of what was expected or forbidden and obeyed impulses as they occurred. That, then, was the source of the madwomen’s frailty: They were missing the cloak of convention. Their emotions were laid bare.

I surveyed the women in the courtyard, wondering if this notion applied to them. To the melancholiac sitting on the ground, most certainly. This woman felt her very existence as a burden too heavy to bear. The woman talking gibberish to the sky was also so lost in her own world that she seemed oblivious to the world in which she lived, the way a feverish patient may kick off all coverings and expose his body, unaware of his immodesty.

Was that why I was so uncomfortable with Gautier drawing them? Did it seem like an exposure? Somehow the idea made me cringe, the idea of drawing the mad. It had been done often before, I knew, usually with satiric intent. But I had acquitted Gautier of that. Whence my anxiety?

I turned the page of my notebook and looked at the women. I drew a line on the page: the cloak of the woman standing still by the wall. A simple, U-shaped line. Now what? I looked again. I tried to force myself to draw only what my eye saw, not what I knew was there. Not the body in the round, the shoulders or the bowed head, but the patterns of dark and light. Drawing the mad. To see why I felt it was wrong, I would try it.

The pen was a terrible instrument. Every mistake was permanent. It was too black, too coarse. I could make only lines, not shadows, and the lines I made were ugly. The memory of Gautier’s deftness annoyed me. It was so simple for him to draw. He scarcely thought about it, barely considered where the charcoal should next touch the page or how to shape a stroke. I made a few sad, vertical lines to indicate folds on the woman’s cloak. The hem rippled. I drew a wavy line. I hated it.

Hands are difficult. Even gifted artists shy away from hands. I blew the ink dry on the page and turned it over. At the center, toward the top, I made two clusters of tiny lines—one, two, three, four, five. I drew another line down from them, and another—arms, raised overhead. I glanced at the woman talking to the sky, who was now singing and gently swaying, reaching upward. I drew in an oval between the lines, for her head. It was the most rudimentary, clumsy sketching. I had taken lessons in Lille; I knew better ways to do these things. But something drove me to continue. I wanted to finish what I had begun. Features in the oval; dashes for eyes, an open O for the mouth. Hair; straight lines with no hint of the limpness of the real thing.

It was impossible. I had no idea how to render what I saw into marks on the page. The woman turned, bent at the waist, turned again. I drew a line that gave her a torso, hips, a skirt. The line sagged. I persisted. The shoulders were nonexistent. The nib of the pen sputtered and skipped as I drew, leaving ragged outlines. I didn’t know what to do about feet. I tried, remembering the words of my teacher, to lay down a shadow with a few parallel lines.

I was working faster now, driven by frustration but also a kind of hunger. I didn’t like what I was producing; it made me despise my incapacity. But as I drew, something strange happened. I could not translate what I saw into lines on the page. But I could, by trying to draw the women, share their physical state. I could sense the strange internal rhythm that prompted one to dance, the black weight that surrounded and stifled the melancholiac.

One of the
furieuses
had come into the courtyard wearing her straitjacket. Like some of her fellow patients, she had very short hair. Sometimes the wardresses cut patients’ hair to keep them from pulling it out. Her head looked strangely large and her neck slender, like a child’s. She walked carefully, very upright, as if barely keeping her balance with every step. I flipped a page and made a quick, narrow triangle—her skirt as she walked. I didn’t know how to continue. For her upper body I drew nothing more than a kind of block, with angles indicated to signal the bent elbows. Her head was not round, but I had made a circle anyway, then corrected it. I was pressing too hard with the pen now, dragging threads of paper with the nib, almost tearing the page. My hands were shaking with my rage and frustration. I could not draw. I could not draw these women. And yet I felt a kind of compulsion to do it. I was sure I knew now how to walk in a
gilet de force
.

The chapel bell began to ring, and I knew it was time for me to go. My absence at the Faculté de Médecine had been remarked on with disapproval. I screwed the cap onto my pen and slipped it into my pocket, but I carried my notebook by the cover, to let the pages flutter themselves dry in the air. Later that day I returned to the hospital and coaxed a wardress to button me into one of the straitjackets. She must have thought I looked comical, pacing up and down the empty dormitory with my hands trapped in the endless sleeves and tied behind my back.

That night, at home, I tore the sheets from my notebook and spread them out on my table. What I saw made me flinch, yet it also held my attention. The drawings were raw, even ugly. But they had a vivid quality that surprised me. They were direct and urgent. I had somehow managed to capture some of the emotional force of my mad patients. And though I never said so directly to Gautier, his big Salon painting
The Women of the Salpêtrière
—an achievement, a success, an example of everything painting aspired to in 1857—remained for me a beautiful but somehow tepid canvas.