Chapter 23

The Madwomen’s Ball, La Salpêtrière, Paris

1884

‘Guess who I am? Let me give you a clue.’ Georges held out his arms, showing off lace cuffs stained red. He wore a powdered wig under a tricorn hat, a tight black suit and white stockings.

‘Are you a revolutionary?’ Camille said.

‘The most revolutionary of them all,’ he said with a bow. ‘Some called me le dicatateur sanguinaire.’

She clapped her hands. ‘Robespierre!’

‘Bravo! And tell me who you are supposed to be – someone biblical by the look of that sword and, ugh, is that a severed head? Delilah? No, don’t tell me. Salomé!’

‘Artemisia Gentileschi.’

Georges groaned. ‘Of course, I might have known it – one of the first women artists. She has a lot to answer for, encouraging you harridans. And you, Jessie, let me see you.’ He held out his hand and I stepped into the lamplight. Georges whistled softly between his teeth and made me turn around, I suspect so he could see the full effect of the breeches. After he’d had a good look, he said: ‘The fruit basket gives it away – the Caravaggio that hangs in the Villa Borghese.’ I was surprised he’d made the connection. In those days Caravaggio had fallen out of favour and few studied his work, but he was my favourite painter. George took a bunch of grapes from my basket and put one in his mouth. ‘You make a handsome boy,’ he said. ‘Be careful, or you’ll have Camille falling for you.’ Camille and I laughed uneasily and Georges smiled. His instinct for people’s tender places was uncanny. ‘We all look crazy enough to fit right in with our hosts at the insane asylum,’ he said. ‘But just wait till you see La Bonheur’s disguise.’

We walked to the cab, where standing in full military regalia, hand tucked into his waistcoat, stood Napoleon Bonaparte.

Rosa gave a suitably napoleonic scowl. ‘Salute your emperor, my loyal subjects.’ She touched her general’s hat. ‘I thought les folles would like this, since most of them think they are married to Napoleon anyway. Who knows? I might get lucky with a tasty little lunatic tonight.’

Georges pulled me forward. ‘At least Jessie will be safe from your advances, Rosa, as she’s dressed as one of Caravaggio’s boys, and a pretty one at that.’

Rosa whistled. ‘You make a delectable boy, Jessie. But as my tastes run to the fairer sex, I’ll have to make do with Camille, who is looking just as edible, I must say, in that tight bodice. Don’t tell me…Artemisia Gentileschi?’

La Salpêtrière was more like a city within a city than an asylum for women. On the way, Rosa explained that the ball was one of the curiosities of Parisian life, drawing fashionable people curious about the insane, but it was also supposed to help the patients by giving them something to look forward to. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was not immune to the low thrill of voyeurism. We were all jittery and talking loudly, but as the cab passed through the forbidding, high walls, we fell silent.

Once we were inside, the ballroom was a surprise. It was brightly lit and cheerfully decorated with flowers and plants. An orchestra on a central podium was playing a waltz and there were women dancing together. Two benches along the walls held the more unfortunate inmates who wore their afflictions in their distorted expressions and deformed bodies. But even they sat quietly watching the spectacle. It was the guests – the sane – who appeared most excitable, shrieking and cackling over each other’s costumes, as if the mad house had released them from their everyday social restraints. We huddled together uncertainly until Rosa broke free, swooping on a pair of dancers and claiming one as her partner. The woman left behind looked lost among the circling couples. She was dressed as a Pierrot, and looked sad despite her painted-on smile. I touched her on the shoulder and she jumped.

‘May I have this dance?’ I said.

She kept her head down while I led her around the dance floor, but by the third turn of the room she was studying me.

She cleared her throat, as if she was not used to speaking. ‘You are a sculptor.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Your hands, they’re calloused and rough.’

‘I could be a laundress or a housemaid,’ I said.

Her laugh was a dry bark. ‘And what would a laundress or a housemaid be doing at The Ball of the Incoherents?’ She looked around her and whispered. ‘That’s what the doctors call it. I know because I listen at doors and at night I break into the office and read their notes.’ She put her head to one side. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Jessie.’

‘I am Hersilie.’

We stopped at a buffet table covered in delicacies. In the glow from hundreds of candles, little cakes dusted with sugar sparkled and fish mousses quivered. I watched her pile her plate high.

Hersilie spoke with her mouth full, her eyes roving over the table. ‘Me, I’m also an artist.’

‘I see,’ I said.

She could tell I didn’t believe her. She stopped pushing food into her mouth and gripped my arm with greasy, bony fingers.

‘I swear to you, I’m a painter. I ought to know, that’s why they put me in here.’

I shook her off and rubbed the red marks she’d left on my skin. I tried to feel compassion for her, but there was something abrasive and unlikeable about her.

I took a breath and tried again. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Let’s see, I was twenty when my brother had me locked up.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Fifteen years.’ That made her only thirty-five but she looked much older. Her hair was grey and her skin heavily lined under the white powder. She brushed some crumbs from her mouth and grinned, showing rotten and missing teeth. ‘Do you want to know why they put me in here? I bet you do, you all do.’

I shook my head unable to take my eyes from her.

‘I’ll tell you anyway. It was because I lived on my own, dared to earn my own living as an artist. Too ambitious, you see, for a mere woman, I must be mad, no other explanation.’ She laughed softly. ‘Want to stay single and paint for a living? You must be suffering from acute monomania with hallucinations. Added to that, the neighbours hated me and called me an unfriendly bitch, a witch, an oddball. When my half-brother put me away, those bastards couldn’t wait to line up and testify against me to the quack paid to commit me.’

Her breath was rancid and I wanted to step back, but I was mesmerised. ‘That’s monstrous! Why would your brother do a thing like that?’

‘Half-brother. When our father died, he wanted my share of the inheritance. He robbed me!’ Hersilie shook her fist but tucked it behind her back when a nurse looked our way and jangled her keys in warning.

I told myself there must have been another reason. This woman was odd in her speech and manner, but put Rosa in here for fifteen years, or Camille, or I, and I doubted we would be any different. I thought of what Camille and I had done earlier this evening, of my feelings for her, and for Georges, and in the background, like a reproach, William. Their mouths had all been on mine and I had hungered for each of them. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps other women didn’t go through this, not if they were normal. If a doctor could read the thoughts that swirled inside of my head, he would condemn me as vicious, an overheated hysteric. And there was Rosa, swaggering about dressed as a man but with the sympathies and nature of a woman. Compared to us, Hersilie was quite sane.

She was talking again, as if once she’d begun to speak, she could not stop. The poor creature told me of her life in the asylum, stories that would come back to haunt me years later, about her first day when she was forced into a bath with an iron cover that left only her head free and doused with bucket after bucket of freezing water. The punishment continued every morning until she finally recanted and gave up her ambitions to live from her art.

‘They call it hydrotherapy,’ she said. ‘More like drowning. Those infernal baths! If you struggle, the metal cuts your neck.’ She leaned her head to one side and showed me her scars.

I gasped and went to touch them, stopped and put my hand to my own throat. ‘That’s torture. You must complain to one of the doctors.’

Another dry bark. ‘Who do you think came up with the water treatment if not one of those demons who call themselves doctors? You are shocked, Mademoiselle, but then nobody knows what goes on here behind locked doors. You are an artist like me, a free spirit, so I shall tell you everything and you will tell everyone else – don’t forget to inform the President and the Holy Father in Rome – and I shall be released.’

She gabbled at me in a low voice and the horror of her life crept into my ears. A bath could take between one hour and twelve hours, depending on a patient’s level of madness and how long they took to recant. The doctor evidently thought Hersilie one of the saner ones, or she was quick to give up her ideas as the fantasies of a lunatic. But she still suffered, she told me, for crimes such as helping another inmate who had fainted, forgetting to return a pair of scissors to a nurse and writing a few words on the wall. In punishment, Hersilie had been chained by the neck and fifty buckets of water emptied over her head, and she was often forced into a straitjacket and tied to her bed. I could hardly bear to listen and wanted to get away from her, to leave this place with its smiling nurses in their white headscarves pinned neatly behind their heads, the doctors in their suits, conferring in little groups, while the women patients twirled round and round the dance floor. But I could not tear myself away from Hersilie and instead moved closer to catch her muttered words.

‘See that girl over there – the imbecile?’ She nodded at a young woman with a wide smile that never wavered and vacant eyes. ‘They tie her arms behind her back so tight the rope cuts her and push her head into a bucket of water. What good can that do? She’s like an infant, thinks it’s a game, laughs when she sees them coming and puts on the rope herself.

‘The worst punishment – they call it a treatment of course – is to be isolated in a cell. You lose track of the days, of the months. They’re not supposed to do it any more, but they do it in the extreme cases, to incurables like the tribades.’ My French was by now faultless and I had often been told I spoke like a native, but this word was new to me. My forehead creased and she realised I had not understood her meaning. Hersilie spoke in a hoarse whisper. ‘You know, women who make love with other women. Like your friend over there.’ She was looking at Rosa, who had her arms draped around her dancing partner, a thin woman with hollow eyes. ‘I see she’s with Monique, one of the masturbators. Her hands are usually cuffed.’

I started back, embarrassed. ‘What?’

‘You know, to stop her touching herself.’ Hersilie leered at me. ‘You are shocked? Excusez-moi, j’appelle toujours un chat un chat.’

This Monique had not been caught doing anything out of the ordinary, according to Hersilie, but her doctor had picked up classic signs of onanism, which left women thin with a blue tinge to the eyelids.

‘What nonsense!’ I said. I was beginning to doubt this woman’s account; such things were not talked about in those days. Her mouth twisted. ‘It is nonsense, of course, you are right. These doctors have their heads stuffed with crazy ideas. The real reason Monique is so skinny is simple – she’s sad and that’s why she won’t eat. Her husband abandoned her and had her committed when he took up with their housemaid. Poor Monique pretends it hasn’t happened, of course, always talking about Charles this and Charles that, how good he is to her and how she must hurry and get the house clean and his dinner ready.’

Hersilie had learned to survive by pretending to the alienists – that’s what they called themselves then, the doctors who treated sick minds – she’d given up her dangerous illusions. To them she was a success story, docile and hardworking. They were considering her release but meanwhile her days were filled with the backbreaking laundry and tedious needlework believed to be beneficial for women with damaged minds.

‘When I get out, I’m going to tell the whole world about what goes on in here, but I don’t know when that will be, so it’s up to you,’ she said.

‘But, why don’t you write to the authorities now and complain?’ I said.

‘They read all our letters and punish us if they don’t like what we write. I learned that the hard way,’ she said, rubbing her wrists. ‘But I have my helpers who smuggle letters out for me. I keep one on me all the time. Will you take it and make sure it’s posted? It’s addressed to the only person who can help me.’

‘Of course I shall.’

‘Here, shake my hand.’ Hersilie slipped me a piece of paper, which I shoved into my pocket. She raised her voice. ‘Au revoir, Mademoiselle.’

I nodded at her and she mouthed: ‘Tell your friend to be careful.’ She nodded towards Rosa, but the warning could as easily have been for Camille.

I pushed my way through the crowd of Parisians in their elaborate costumes. They guzzled champagne and screeched with laughter while the inmates looked on, their expressions glazed. Someone pulled at my arm and I turned. A young woman held out a bundle of rags to me, her hands scarred with burn marks.

‘Do you see my baby? Isn’t he beautiful? His name is Alphonse, mon petit Alphonse.’

I looked into the bundle and saw a piece of wood, crudely drawn features. I tried to smile at her, but found myself running across the room towards Camille and Georges.

Georges was leaning against a wall, looking bored, but straightened up when he saw me. ‘Have you had enough? Do you want to go?’

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I would tell them about Hersilie later.

Camille put away her sketchpad. ‘It’s horrible here, isn’t it? I’ve been in prisons and in orphanages, but there’s something depressing about this place, I don’t know what it is. I thought they would be strange, different somehow from normal people, but instead they just seem so hopeless, and so sad.’

Georges shrugged. ‘Let’s go, then. The morgue is more cheerful. I’ll see if I can prise Rosa away from her latest conquest.’

In the cab I took out the letter Hersilie had given me, intending to show it to the others. It was folded and sealed with candle wax. I turned it over. Scrawled across it in a shaky hand were some words in rusty red ink. I sniffed and smelled the unmistakeable metallic tang of dried blood. It was addressed to Jeanne d’Arc. So, she was mad, after all. I crumpled up the letter and threw it out of the window. I watched the walls of La Salpêtrière recede behind us, vowing I would never set foot in a hellhole like that again.