4 December 1920, Paris. An agitated woman in her early fifties disembarks a Métro train, still a relatively new system of transportation around the city. She approaches two gendarmes. She is being followed, she says. Other passengers are making fun of her. She demands protection. The police do nothing and the woman becomes increasingly irate and then lashes out physically at one of them. They take her into custody.
She is brought to the Infirmerie Spéciale, the psychiatric triage on the Île de la Cité, which is situated within a vast building housing a maze of public offices. It is here that a psychiatrist named Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault will assess her through his favoured round-lens pince-nez spectacles, perched above a neat moustache. At forty-eight he’s just a little younger than his interviewee. She’s wearing a low-fitting cloche hat, pulled down like a helmet, a ubiquitous style which requires her to look out from under the narrow rim, giving her an independent, even defiant air. She is a milliner it turns out, so she knows her hats. The hemline on her dress is just high enough to show a flash of ankle, her top sufficiently low cut for the physician to notice. He asks her to explain her behaviour at the station. The King of England, she says gravely, is in love with her.
De Clérambault has just become the head physician at the Infirmerie connected to the Prefecture of Police. He’s been physician there since 1905 so he knows its comings and goings. He takes his pen out of his breast pocket to jot down a few more details about her delusion. ‘Léa-Anna B’ will be her pseudonym.
She tells him about the moment she was certain of the king’s attitude towards her. She now realised that he had tried to make his intentions clear through special officers who appeared disguised as sailors, or tourists, but she didn’t understand until it was too late that they had been sent by the king. Looking back, it made sense that the knowing glances and the cryptic remarks were intended for her, but she had missed them. Many of her visits to Paris had coincided with high days and holidays, such as the fête de Jeanne d’Arc, celebrating the heroine of the Hundred Years War, and, of course, the fête de Noël. These festivities distracted her and she wasn’t paying close attention. One day, when travelling by train, she met an officer from the retinue of General Lyautey, who revealed that he was an emissary from King George V. That was when she realised that the king was surveilling her, through secret representatives who had adopted a variety of disguises.
All the previous incidents suddenly fell into place. That knock on the door of her hotel room late one evening, for instance, must have been the king wanting a rendezvous. This misunderstanding had resulted in a delicate situation. Because she had not responded to his advances, he would naturally assume that she was rejecting him. Nothing could be further from the truth. What she needed to do now was to explain to him that she returned his love. So she set off for London to speak to the sovereign as soon as she could.
De Clérambault does a tough job. He oversees the well-populated area where policing meets medicine. Attached to the Prefecture’s Infirmerie is a forensic psychiatry centre. He was chief psychiatrist for the Paris police through the 1920s and into the 1930s and he’s a lawyer by training, so he plays a key role in describing, documenting and committing many of those who come to him through the system. He has been in post for fifteen years, conducting surveillance of those people who exist in the lowest social and economic strata: the high number of recent migrants to the city without a home or basic income; absinthe addicts, prostitutes, petty criminals. This is a good one. He asks her to continue.
The king began making advances in 1918, she said. From then on, she paid numerous visits to London so that she might speak to him and correct the record, spending extravagant sums of money on each trip. She waited around in the main railway stations imagining that the king would somehow get word to her of when they would meet. She prowled around the royal residences, finding her way eventually to Buckingham Palace and wandering around the perimeter there. She now believed not only that George V was in love with her, but that all of London, even the palace courtiers, knew of their affair and wanted it to succeed, including the blood princess Mary and her cousins who wanted her to become the king’s mistress. She once saw a curtain move in one of the palace windows and interpreted this as a sign that the king was watching her. There were additional signs, but no direct contact.
Did ‘Léa-Anna B’s hunt for signs take her to St James’s Palace, where Margaret Nicholson had loitered more than a century before, waiting for the usurper King George III? Certainly ‘Léa-Anna B’ shows a similar tendency to grandiosity as Margaret Nicholson did, in de Clérambault’s version of events anyway. Nicholson did not believe King George III was in love with her – she was claiming her birthright – but both women express profound grievance at not being helped, and both are demanding undivided attention from the head of state.
When James Tilly Matthews received no response to his letters to the government, he turned up shouting during a debate in the House of Commons. ‘Léa-Anna B’ was ignored, on one trip after another to London. And, like Matthews, her thoughts began to darken. She came to believe that the king was deliberately scuppering her arrangements when she was in the city. On one visit to the capital, she says, the king had somehow organised it so that she would lose her way, and made her forget which hotel she was staying in so that she lost her bookings. He had also arranged things so that her trunk, which was stuffed with money and numerous portraits of the king, would go astray. The king had impoverished her so she had organised a sale of her furniture in the provinces. The sovereign foiled that, too, and had the auction frozen. She was still fearful about her money, and carried thousands of francs around with her on her person. Nonetheless, her passion for him is undimmed: ‘The King might hate me, but he can never forget,’ she says. ‘I could never be indifferent to him, nor he to me… It is in vain that he hurts me… I was attracted to him from the depths of my heart.’
She continued spending money with abandon while she waited around for a word from the king, ran low on funds and eventually returned to Paris, angry, frustrated and with significantly less in her pockets. Then came the incident on the Métro train in Paris and she was frogmarched into the psychiatric system to meet the doctor who would record her case for posterity. She was experiencing a crisis of hope, de Clérambault surmised. He referred her to the psychiatric institution of Sainte-Anne, the same asylum in which ‘Madame M’ had received her initial consultation the previous year.
Her certificate of admission is brief and to the point: it mentions an alcoholic father and calls the family ‘disunited’. There is no serious hereditary family illness, as far as the physician knows. But ‘Léa-Anna B’ is always lying, he says. She is an ‘authoritarian’, and her suspicions about the world have existed for a long time. She is ‘proud’, above all. Is this the same ‘ruinous pride’ that scuppered Margaret Nicholson? He calls her story of a royal suitor a ‘paradoxical game’.
It is a game he is interested in playing. What does ‘Léa-Anna B’ want? He and his colleagues are at quite a pitch of writing up theories around delusions and presenting them to each other in lectures where they can argue out the points in public. From 1920, de Clérambault writes numerous articles about erotomania. He publishes nine case studies, with commentaries on a further three, in which he marshals his thoughts on a broader category of what he calls ‘psychoses passionnelles’. He collaborates with Joseph Capgras on some of the cases, and they were well known for their sparring on the subject. The two are old associates. They both joined the conglomerate of psychiatric institutions known as ‘Asiles de la Seine’ in 1898 and continue to take turns as lecturer and audience for one another and to scrap about the interpretation of symptoms. It was de Clérambault who sat in on the demonstration of ‘Madame M’ and gave his tuppence worth on the cause of her delusion of substitute doubles. He suggested hallucinations were involved; ‘Madame M’ denied this in the strongest terms.
A few weeks after ‘Léa-Anna B’ is brought in, de Clérambault and another colleague, Brousseau, discuss her case at a session of the Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale and in 1921 de Clérambault publishes a landmark paper detailing the delusion.1 He has been developing his thinking around erotomania for some time, and a few other examples have turned his head, but the case of ‘Léa-Anna B’ won’t be put to bed. There is more he wants to talk about: the modiste, or milliner, is now fifty-three years old. She was well established in her work before she came to the hospital but she spends a lot of time completely ‘idle’, having apparently lived an easy life thanks to the grace of a rich and high-ranking lover.
Where did she come from?
‘Léa-Anna B’ was born in the late 1860s, not long before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
The years ‘Léa-Anna B’ made hats coincided with the heyday of the millinery trade in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. This was an industry which employed thousands in small, independent millinery shops, often as not run by women. If you were in that line of work you often had jobs in dress shops, too, in the hat departments of Galeries Lafayette, for example, or Le Bon Marché, the art nouveau temples to retail which offered a touch of the sparkle of couture at more affordable prices. ‘Madame M’ was just a couple of years younger than ‘Léa-Anna B’ and also making her way in the city at this time. They could conceivably have crossed paths somewhere on the teeming boulevards where dresses and hats were made and sold. ‘Léa-Anna B’ was well established in her métier by her early twenties. Working women like ‘Léa-Anna B’ didn’t usually have much of an education before they started an apprenticeship and, after years of hard work that didn’t promise to lift them out of their circumstances, many looked for financial security in a relationship, a perfectly legitimate route.
When she was twenty-two ‘Léa-Anna B’s circumstances changed. She became the mistress of a rich and well-connected lover. The relationship lasted eighteen years. When her lover died in 1907, she enjoyed her freedom, as well as using it for what de Clérambault calls ‘personal benefit’. She quickly got together with a much younger man. Her doctor suggests he was easy to dominate. He also, apparently, owned a castle.
He bought her a house a fair way from Paris, and they spent the war years there together. She enjoyed some hospitality in local society as a ‘kept’ woman, but she became lonely, suffering from being uprooted from the city and transplanted into the sticks.
Given how badly adjusted she was to rural life, it’s a fair bet that ‘Léa-Anna B’ wasn’t originally from the countryside. People who migrated into Paris from provincial towns typically didn’t have money to fall back on. She had become a rich woman, but she’d been a mistress for eighteen years rather than a wife and although seemingly happy enough with the arrangement, it would have meant living with a degree of insecurity. The choice of a new lover, after the first died, represented even greater heights in terms of status and money. She fully intended to marry this man, she tells her doctor. According to de Clérambault, ‘Léa-Anna B’ spent too much time on her own. She makes the very mistake Robert Burton warned against in the Anatomy. Without enough to do, she begins to feel alienated from the world she knows.
This was the period when ‘Léa-Anna B’s trips to London began in earnest, coinciding it seems with a developing love affair with England and its different customs and diversions. She would stay in luxury hotels and invite numerous godchildren to town to show them a good time in the restaurants, cinemas and department stores. Each time, however, she had to come back to her isolation in the French countryside.
At forty-three she began to complain of organised persecution by the local farmers, who were accusing her of sexually corrupting this young man she lived with. The new relationship brought money, but it also brought mounting moral censorship from the community. And he did not marry her, despite her express desire to become his wife.
She’d apparently shown symptoms of paranoia before the war, but ‘Léa-Anna B’ described constant persecution from 1913 onwards, as well as fits of jealousy. She believed that she was being followed and spied on. The farmers played pranks on her, harassed her, sent thugs to insult her, followed her everywhere. Once the war had started, when she was forty-eight and believing she had been denounced as a spy, she destroyed foreign government documents during a fit of ‘spite’ that lasted for six weeks, she said. In 1917 she came to believe that an American general who commanded a nearby army base during the war was in love with her. On many of her extravagant trips away from home, she thought she was the object of silent advances by officers of many ranks, and regretted not having taken advantage of the situation. She offers a long list of the other things her neighbours said about her, their campaign to sully her reputation escalating. The paranoid and grandiose thoughts intensify.
‘Madame M’ reconciles her personal losses with a world in which her loved ones have been replaced by doubles. ‘Léa-Anna B’ creates an alternative reality in which she is a critical component in the war effort, the keeper of military secrets that other people want and she must burn, in the manner of a fictional heroine, in order to save lives. It is her mission to expose the conspiracy of the farmers to blacken her good name. She is at the centre of things, and she’s an object of fascination and attention, even if it is of the negative variety. She has found the perfect setting in London, another glamorous city, not too far away, with a state-of-the-art underground train system much like the one in Paris. London, though, is a new society – she’s found herself on the wrong side in France. The city allows her to reinvent herself.
And then in 1911 her relationship with her lover ruptures after four years together and she unceremoniously, publicly, loses her only social defence against the neighbours.
‘Léa-Anna B’s fortunes changed again in her own eyes at least, this time reversing in the wrong direction, from high to low status. She was rejected, humiliated. It was the breakup, her doctor speculated, that set off the full-blown delusion,
More probing from de Clérambault leads to a few key discoveries. One of the people who publicly denounced her as a spy in the countryside was her priest. There was also an incident when she stood accused of being underdressed in public. A low décolletage had been necessary, she said in her own defence, since the onset of her angina which followed diphtheria. She undresses to relieve a rapid heartbeat. She also mentions having had jaundice for six months in 1915.
She has come to believe there are machinations against her, instigated by what she refers to as an ‘ancient family’ in the country. De Clérambault wonders if it’s the family of her ex-lover. She only gets this hostility in Paris, not London, which is another reason for the allure of the English capital over the French. A sense of eroticism and exhibitionism weaves itself in and out of her account. We sense this sexuality has also been the root of shame.
Then, into this world steps another high-ranking figure. They don’t come any higher, in mortal form anyway, than the King of England, and he is in love with her. Her delusional beliefs build to an erotic crescendo starring George V, which is only accelerated by the deafening – she would call it pregnant – silence from the palace. ‘Léa-Anna B’ performs some serious contortions of logic in order to sustain her belief in the king’s love, given that he’s been ignoring her. The king was in love with her, she explains, but since he’s now rejecting her, it must be hate rather than indifference; the kind of hate that is an extension of grand passion, and the feelings she ventriloquises are as strong as they ever were. There is yet more grandiosity. The king is just one of a long line of men who have been in love with her: officers of many ranks, the American general, another king even, this time the Belgian monarch, who wrote letters to her. The nature of the rejection from her point of view is also interesting: she is ignored only because she didn’t see the signs or respond to the men’s advances. In other words, she rejected all of them first.
It was Hippocrates, the ‘Father of Medicine’ who first described the kind of ‘raving love’ that Galen attributed to an imbalance of the humours. Characters whose senses are wildly disturbed by love, like Dido prostrate with love for Aeneas, or Helena pining for Demetrius in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream have a place in the collective romantic imagination. Shakespeare’s play dramatises the strange subjectivity of love, which is rarely conveniently returned. A fairy potion dropped into an eye can alter perception and make a person fall in and out of love at first sight. If only it were that simple.
The idea of ‘love melancholy’ as a kind of mental illness first appears in literature in 1610 in a work by a physician from Toulouse, Jacques Ferrand: Erotomania, or a Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love, or Erotique Melancholy. It describes the physical manifestations of the ‘unreasonable’ tides of happiness and sadness that accompany love, and recommends treatments to calm this passion. The Inquisition was enraged by the contents of Ferrand’s book, principally because from their perspective lovesickness was in the soul, and therefore a religious matter which Ferrand had no business meddling in with his earthly cures like changes to diet and exercise regimens. They also objected to Ferrand’s discussion of sex, as well as mentions of astrology and palmistry as a way of reading the future, even though he carefully debunked these claims as he went along. Robert Burton possessed a copy of the 1623 edition of Ferrand’s work and seems to have been profoundly influenced by it: a substantial chapter of the third part of Burton’s Anatomy is entirely devoted to ‘Symptoms or signs of Love-Melancholy’.
Burton describes the mental disturbance brought about by infatuation, calling it ‘a plague, a torture, a hell, a bitter-sweet passion at last’ and, fundamentally, a ‘perturbation of the senses’ with clearly identifiable symptoms. He includes in the Anatomy most of the world’s great love stories by way of example, from the ancient myths, to contemporaneous plays and poems. Love has been the realm of poets and playwrights, but both he and Ferrand are looking for the pathology. ‘Love Melancholy’ may produce sonnets in some, and can be a sign of a refined soul, but it can also be an illness which requires treatment. Burton uses up a good deal of ink and page to warn of the dangers to mental health of sexual frustration in a woman. This idea is still running four hundred years later when, in 1921, the British psychiatrist Bernard Hart refers to erotomania as ‘Old Maid’s Insanity’.2
*
An understanding that the mind can be profoundly disturbed by infatuation has existed as long as there have been people in love. From early childhood we are presented with a pantheon of literary figures tortured in one way or another by unrequited love. What ‘Léa-Anna B’ presents us with, however, is something different. ‘Erotomania’ as described in the early twentieth century was the belief that someone else was in love with them. It’s a twist on the old trope of a person in love to an excessive degree, usually with someone who doesn’t feel the same way. The nineteenth-century madness of unrequited love, the obsessional love or ‘monomania’ that Jean-Étienne Esquirol had written about in 1845, was rerouted and tuned back on itself. Joseph Capgras and Paul Sérieux, in their joint work on disorders of interpretation of 1909, saw this as another example of a person reading the world wrong, fixing on someone they have never met but who they feel they know because of the mysterious clues they are picking up which they, and only they, can interpret. In 1913, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin talked about the delusion of someone else being in love with you as a kind of paranoia.
‘Léa-Anna B’ also told de Clérambault about an extraordinary system called ‘La Morve’ which gives form to the conspiracy against her. It translates literally as ‘snot’ and this strange material moves around crowds affecting behaviour. ‘La Morve’ was how she explained the numerous exchanges of signs between strangers that she said she witnessed. Like the magnetic rays from James Tilly Matthews’s ‘Air Loom’, it’s an organising concept for a secret plot, but ‘La Morve’ manifests something like the clouds of ectoplasm that mediums produced at seances. The people who follow her make ‘sniffling noises’, and she names them ‘La Morve’, too. She cannot escape, she says, and her situation is a ‘flying prison, mobile cage, and perpetual chains’. ‘La Morve’ tracks her and envelops her, expressing her tightening sense of claustrophobia.
People often describe something like a ghostly apparition when recalling how their delusion first appeared. A person bears witness to a strange reality but the people around them don’t believe a word of it. It is wildly improbable, but they are unshakably convinced of its reality and the urgency of the revelation even if they can’t convince anyone else of its authenticity. Disproving evidence won’t shake a delusional belief any more than turning on the light and checking behind the curtains will make belief in a phantom evaporate.
The history of ghost sightings throws up time-honoured stock themes and ‘types’: the unquiet ancestor shrouded in white avenging an unresolved injustice from the past; the petulant poltergeist. Delusions, similarly, offer us familiar motifs which recur again and again over millennia. The beliefs are easily debunked, but the stories are about more than that. Just as there is social history in ghost hunting which is not contingent on whether ghosts can be proven or disproven, certain themes acquire meaning from the hundreds of years people have repeated them in their delusions and passed them down the generations.
‘Léa-Anna B’s life before she meets de Clérambault is sketchy and difficult to make out. But there is an event she relates to her doctor which stands out, like ‘Madame X’s first communion, and ‘Madame M’ catching sight of the uniforms being loaded onto the truck or the unusual appearance of the baby’s fingernails suggesting poisoning. ‘Léa-Anna B’ mentions it only in passing and it’s separated from its context, but it interests her doctor. She had, she said, burned a collection of prints, of her relatives in the first Boer war. She told him she had looked after the prints with care, until the date of the burning. De Clérambault fails to join up this event with the other things he knows about her, and this burning remains a cryptic act, with a backstory we cannot access. De Clérambault has called her a habitual liar, but it is hard to see why she would lie about such an event and give such strange and specific details when there’s no obvious reason to do so. She doesn’t try to explain it or use it as justification for her behaviour. If we can take her at her word – in this instance at least – it appears she did have relatives who were involved in the Boer War of 1880–81. The fact that she had carefully kept their pictures for at least twenty years, and then dramatically burned them, suggests that de Clérambault’s note about a ‘disunited’ family was on the money, and that her feelings towards this family were at the very least complex and unresolved. The questions go unanswered, but leave us with a haunting imprint of deep, dark family secrets.
There are further hints of skeletons rattling in her family’s cupboard. When de Clérambault conducted one of the early interviews with ‘Léa-Anna B’ he asked her brother-in-law and twenty-eight-year-old niece to act as witnesses to help test her lies. It’s a very uncomfortable setup and the skeletons begin to rattle as she explains to these family members why she’s ended up in trouble with the authorities. The doctor reports that she immediately starts spinning them a yarn. She says she has simply been taken ill with something or other, and brought in for a cure. She is all smiles, all affection. De Clérambault said the team would have been fooled by her if they hadn’t known better. She writes down a statement for the doctors demonstrating very poor writing and spelling, but she knows what she wants to say, and the document confirms to the doctors that she is free from ‘graphorrée’ (the compulsive scribblings of a ‘mad person’ which they are trained to look out for). In return for her freedom, she pledges not to go down into the Métro again and to dress more modestly from now on. She reproaches the doctor for noting down that her father was an alcoholic. He was wrong to do this, when she had just opened ‘the garden of her heart’ to him and his colleagues, and he’s a hypocrite for shaking her hand. She reassures him that they really don’t need to worry about any future bad behaviour. She wants to live in England because she prefers the laws there. She is an Anglophile. It’s as simple as that. She will be travelling there with the Thomas Cook travel agency, and if she does go to Buckingham Palace she’ll be discreet, she promises. She has plenty of pictures of the king in her case to be getting on with. Again, says her doctor, here she is lying with a natural ease. She accuses him of abusing a pretty Parisian milliner. He scoffs at her efforts to present herself as chaste. He doesn’t believe a word of it.
There is more to de Clérambault than meets the eye, too. He was born just a year after the Siege of Paris, and moved to the city at the age of thirteen to study at the Collège Stanislas. This was an interesting moment to be arriving at a prestigious private Catholic school. The Jules Ferry Laws had just taken control of education away from clerics and the college was a dinosaur that would have to fight to survive. Like ‘Madame M’ and ‘Léa-Anna B’, he spent his formative years after the Collège Stanislas in a city bursting with creative energy. This perhaps goes some way to explaining his parallel passion for, and expertise in, the visual arts. Alongside his day job he lectures on the art of draped costumes at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and promotes the idealised forms of ancient Greece and Rome.
And he has secrets, too. If you were to go to his home, unbeknownst even to his closest friends you would find lengths of fur, silk, velvet, satin, taffeta and even a mannequin swagged in these fabrics. Given his study of draped costume it’s safe to say that he knows his way around the Paris ateliers, and he knows about millinery and the styles of the day. Let’s not forget he admitted a couturière at the Infirmerie back in 1918 who was ranting during the interview about how her husband had been replaced by doubles.
He’s a good liar, too. By way of an attempt to cure her of her delusion, de Clérambault informs ‘Léa-Anna B’ that she is to appear before a committee of eminent men. Their reputations extend all the way to England, he tells her, and he encourages her to take this opportunity and plead her cause in front of them. He stages a mock demonstration, pretending that he will be able to arrange a meeting with the king, although he says he’s not sure it’s a good idea. He wants to see if she will be able to control herself were she ever to come face to face with her admirer. The demonstration is reported in direct speech like a play in Erotomania:
‘I’ll keep my hands like this, behind my back, so you can stand behind me and restrain me.’
‘I’m also afraid that you’ll immediately throw your arms around his neck.’
‘But you can hold me back.’
‘Yes, but what will the princesses say about all this?’
‘They probably won’t even be there.’
‘Didn’t you tell me they were very interested in all this?’
‘That is something between him and me.’3
At de Clérambault’s suggestion, ‘Léa-Anna B’ retires to write a letter to the king and after a quarter of an hour she confidently hands it in. In it, she opens her heart to the king, humbly assuring him of her deepest affection and that she reciprocates his feelings for her. She tells him that she’s hoping he will arrange for her to come to England. It is signed ‘L. Anna B à l’hôpital Ste-Anne. Paris, le 20 Décembre 1920’. De Clérambault tells his colleagues that a ruse such as this invariably works with a patient like ‘Léa-Anna B’. The old ones are the best. We raise an eyebrow at his confidence. This belief in ruses as legitimate, long-lasting cures will look different later in the century after landmark cases like the Three Christs of Ypsilanti and the ethical mess they left behind.
Capgras wrote up additional cases of people who believed others were in love with them when they were not. The notes are brief and fragmentary, we catch glimpses of eyes and ankles only, and they offer very little context, but nonetheless some clear themes emerge.
Capgras describes the 1921 case of ‘Léontine D’, a twenty-eight-year-old worker who believed that a captain wanted to marry her. Another woman, thirty-three-year-old ‘Renée Pétronille S’, insisted that a government clerk was in love with her, kept watch over her and was having her followed by prostitutes as well as some subordinates under his instructions, over a period of seven years. Apparently, this began when she was turned down for a ‘safe conduct’ pass to travel during the war in 1915, and then, after some flirtatious approaches, she became violent, and the letters started. She didn’t deny that he was married, but suggested they live in a ménage à trois.
The love-struck authority figure in one case is a doctor, and in another a priest. ‘Clémentine D’ had neighbours who were trying to control her through electromagnetic machines. De Clérambault also describes the particularly striking case of ‘Henrietta H’ from 1923. Over a thirty-seven-year period, this fashion designer, now fifty-five, had the recurrent belief that a priest both loved and persecuted her. The erotic delusion began suddenly during mass, and from then on she harassed the priest remorselessly. The family tried to deal with this by marrying her off, but less than a year later she began a series of affairs. Tranquil periods were followed by reawakenings of her love, when she would return impulsively to Paris to pursue this same priest again. After a divorce, she worked as a domestic servant, but only in households with a telephone, and continued her ambushes, scenes, letters and calls.4 There is one instance of a man suffering from erotomania among de Clérambault’s notes. In 1921, ‘Louis G’, a thirty-four-year-old ‘fitter’, denied the legality of a divorce from his wife, and came to believe that she was pursuing him.
Patterns reveal themselves: the women in the notes are more often than not in menial jobs: in factories, working piecemeal as seamstresses or in service, while the ‘enamoured’ males are medics and clergy.
De Clérambault’s observations on ‘Léa-Anna B’ – the first clinical account of erotomania – coincides with the birth of Hollywood and its spotlight on romantic love. Vulgar melodramas playing out stories of grand passion and all sorts of variations on the theme were up on the silver screen, larger than life, and for the first time people were living in their reflected light. Hollywood had distributors around the world and dominated the international market, which the French had led before the war with their more experimental feature filmmaking. The motifs of true love from Hollywood’s golden era arrived in cities and towns. The idea that romance was linked with destiny – that two people were meant to be together – was put in front of people who had until now been more pragmatic about such matters, at least in public, and certainly more modest.
A woman like ‘Léa-Anna B’ would have had plenty of opportunity to see some of the most popular films of 1920: Romance was a silent drama starring Doris Keane. The film featured a priest (yet another) who was in love with an opera singer, and centred on the conflict about whether he should rise above worldly matters or leave with the woman he loves. The Restless Sex featured Stephanie, an appropriately restless and adventurous young woman, who is involved in a torrid love triangle. There is something quintessentially twentieth century, then, about this delusion. ‘Léa-Anna B’ creates a Hollywood fairy tale for herself to star in.
Outside the cinema, things were very different. In 1920, London, the place that for so long had been ‘Léa-Anna B’s entertaining, diverting, escapist world of cinemas and department stores, was a city in shadow.
On her last excursion to London in the winter of that year, on her way to Buckingham Palace, ‘Léa-Anna B’ would have found herself navigating a city trying to come to terms with the staggering losses of the war. If she visited the city on one winter morning in particular, 11 November 1920, she would have been swept up by one of the most remarkable events of the century: the funeral of the ‘Unknown Warrior’. It’s plausible (though in the balance of probability it’s unlikely) she was there that particular day, but whichever day she disembarked at Dover that winter and took a train into Victoria station she found a population mourning its dead. That particular day, 11 November, the mourning had a focus. A soldier had been selected from several unidentified bodies exhumed in northern France and Belgium and brought from Arras. Like her, the body had travelled to England by boat, via Boulogne, and then on a train from Dover, to be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
If she did choose the 11th for her trip, she would have been able to watch the vast, solemn procession pass, and perhaps glimpsed the coffin on a bier, wrapped in a flag, and King George V himself following on foot, all the way from the new Cenotaph to the Abbey. The nameless soldier is to be buried among kings. She would have seen the hundreds of people who had gathered before dawn, standing in the light of the gas lamps lit early for them, outside the northern door of the Abbey before it opened at eight o’clock; queues of women and children, grieving their own sons, husbands and fathers, extending beyond Victoria Tower. More than a million would queue to see the tomb in the weeks and months that followed and even if her last trip to London that winter was on another day, she could still have seen the queue, snaking back from the Abbey door for a hundred yards. She could well have shared her hotel with some of the mourners. The image of a king, humbly on foot, following an anonymous soldier who is to be buried with royalty, would have struck any bystander as a powerful role reversal, which raised up ordinary lives and their extraordinary sacrifices. It’s a tableau that speaks wordlessly of the disruption that the war precipitated; a war that cut down a generation of men and cut millions of romances short.
De Clérambault and his patient were both changed by the war. She’d been isolated in the countryside, but felt the war close by. She met the officers of many ranks and the American general and developed delusions that these officers were in love with her as well as a belief the locals were after her. Already an acclaimed painter and photographer and a pioneer of psychiatry, de Clérambault had fought in the war, serving with the artillery even though he was supposedly three centimetres too short to enlist. At his own request he was sent to the front, and was seriously wounded on two occasions. He was awarded the cross of the Légion d’honneur for his exceptional bravery.
When they came together after the war, most conversations were private, one-to-one negotiations between the doctor trying to understand and describe the delusion in a clinical sense, and his patient, describing it from first-hand experience. The power balance could shift back and forth in a few words. In this case it’s hard to escape a hint of eroticism in how this doctor considered his patient. He wants to look; she wants to be looked at. De Clérambault had seen action on the front line, like so many of his peers. His patient had lived through the same times, the same war, from a different vantage point and a contrasting social standing.
During the war de Clérambault volunteered for a tour of duty in Morocco, which was then a French protectorate, and he returned to the country after the war to photograph Moroccan robes, capturing more than four thousand images, which he used in his lectures on drapery at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1920s. These photographs show faceless apparitions, their form created only by the folds of the shroud. You feel as though you are seeing something which is not there, catching the shape of a person only, their shadow, as you might be tricked by the folds of the bedroom curtains. They are ominous, reminiscent of the unquiet spirits who appear on the galleries of country houses to avenge a past wrong.
De Clérambault’s psychiatric specialism, experience in police work, and his interest in the properties of material all converged in a niche investigation. He worked for years on the psychology of silk fetish – specifically women who stole lengths of silk from department stores and took them home to masturbate with. ‘Kleptomania’ was seen as a particularly female activity, stealing for thrills, but also as a way of being seen. In other words, in the hope, maybe unconscious, of being caught in the act.
After his death, friends clearing de Clérambault’s house discovered his own private collection of fabrics, in all manner of tactile and luxuriant materials, as well as the mannequins he dressed up in the cloths, strongly suggesting he had crossed the line from observing the fetish in others to indulging in it himself.
He practised the martial art of jujitsu and was also renowned for a quick temper, on one occasion demanding a duel when he believed someone had stolen his ideas. With bitter irony, given his passion for looking at the world and its representation, he was plagued in late middle age with failing eyesight caused by cataracts.
On 17 November 1934 he shot himself, in front of the mirror, with his service revolver. It was as if he had contrived the scene of his death to be a piece of performance art. He dramatised the way different realities are created depending on who’s looking. Other doctors gave ‘Léa-Anna B’s delusion the name ‘De Clérambault syndrome’ after his death.
Did ‘Léa-Anna B’ get what she wanted? ‘De Clérambault syndrome’ is in one sense, clearly, a wish fulfilment. It rearranges reality to boost a crushed psyche. De Clérambault came to see it as an answer to the demands of sexual pride that life had failed to provide. Emil Kraepelin picked up this melancholy refrain and called it ‘psychological compensation for the disappointments of life’. It provides an explanation for an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance: a conflict between where a person feels they are, or should be in their personal relations, and where they actually are. ‘De Clérambault syndrome’, like a delusion of grandeur, is also a power grab: the adoration is ‘given’ without the permission or reciprocation of the person who is supposedly feeling it. ‘Léa-Anna B’s claims about the King of England are preposterous, but she is in control, putting thoughts into someone else’s head, and free of the emotional risk, responsibility or regret that comes with being in love, saying so and having to wait for a response.
Psychoanalysis has tended to interpret the belief as a strategy to protect against the distressing sense of being unloved. Freud also described it as a defence mechanism against unwanted sexual impulses which lead to the ‘projection’ of feelings onto others.
It’s now understood that both men and women experience the delusion. Men with ‘De Clérambault syndrome’ are more likely to act in a way which brings them into the criminal justice system – it is now called stalking – and so fewer men relative to women come in front of psychiatrists to be counted. It’s true, too, that women will sometimes have been labelled ‘deluded’ where men might not have been. The concept of ‘hysteria’ was a broad catch-all diagnosis exclusive to woman which connected biology to an innate instability and irrationality in matters of love, passion and sex. Cases of erotomania would easily have been caught in its net and by definition a man would not have been in their number.
‘Léa-Anna B’s is a quintessentially twentieth-century delusion. Individuals in significant numbers began to confide in physicians about the rich and powerful strangers who were in love with them, and many would be forced explain their conduct to the police. This delusion, like paranoia, which is the most common delusion seen by doctors today, must be taken seriously. Being unshakably, and wrongly, convinced of someone’s love, or their villainy, is a serious threat because it justifies future action while denying any responsibility for it. It is sobering to look back at ‘Léa-Anna B’ from the vantage point of a century’s distance when ‘celebrity stalking’ is a pernicious problem, with male as well as female perpetrators. Reality television shows and social media have further blurred the boundaries between real and imagined relationships and encouraged delusional thinking. ‘Léa-Anna B’s delusions, both paranoia and erotomania, went on to define an age we are still living in.
De Clérambault does not report what happened to ‘Léa-Anna B’ after she wrote to the king. He suggests that his ruse was successful. Writing a letter gave her some agency, recorded and witnessed her beliefs, and allowed her mental stability to return. It is possible that she was released from Sainte-Anne at some point, but the records do not continue. She got some of the attention she craved as small compensation for life’s disappointment and hurt pride, so the delusion succeeded on limited terms, for as long as we can follow the story anyway.
As with so many other cases, the lesson here seems to be not to try to explain away a delusion as madness, but to treat it as something important and compelling, even marvellous, like a glass vase or a cloud of vapour or gas that swirls around influencing people. When someone with a delusion is offered kind attention, even the most strident delusion will lose some of its form, dissipate like a mirage, a trick of the light, or vanish into thin air like a will-o’-the-wisp.