I decided to make a pilgrimage to Augustine, to examine for myself the tangible places in which my uncertainty had long dwelled. But I had no money. I arranged an editing job with a magazine editor friend and stayed in my favorite hotel room in Paris: entirely black lacquer—the walls, the bathtub, everything—the ideal surface to render any powdered substances placed upon it as visible as possible. Even the ceiling was mirrored. The lacquer was a useful feature, as pills couldn’t hit me quick enough to get me through a long day at the office, let alone the work that had actually brought me to Paris: finding Augustine, tracing her steps.

While it was the clinical images taken of Augustine that were most etched in my mind, Eugène Atget’s famous 1909 photographs of the Salpêtrière courtyard are striking, and strikingly devoid of the hysterics, libertines, alcoholics, depressives, the poor, and otherwise undesirables who were dumped there after Louis XIV designated the structure, previously a gunpowder factory, as an asylum. Atget took his photographs, which required long exposure times, at dawn, when patients were asleep. “It is no accident that Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “Every passerby a culprit.” Wandering the courtyard of the Salpêtrière after a long day of editing fashion credits and making cuts from interviews was anticlimactic in the opposite sense: far from hallowed ground, the site of Charcot’s spectacular displays of hypnotized women of the leçons du mardi matin is still a functioning hospital complex, where a young woman on a Sebaldian quest for something cannot help but feel rather underfoot. Starting at Place Camatte Zaydoff and passing through the rue des Archers, I approached the housing structures that served as battalions and, soon, the place I was looking for, the Quartier des Folles: three long, narrow, one-story structures that had once housed six hundred hysterics in tiny, isolated cells, each with a respective pole in front of it, to which the hysterics, after an elaborate hygiene regimen, were chained for a daily allotment of fresh air.

These unlucky hysterics, who preceded Augustine and held no hope of her level of success in the hospital’s culture, were freed, in a manner of speaking, by Dr. Philippe Pinel. The truth is less simple. Pinel sometimes expressed uncertainty that the mad patients were truly ill because of their ability to endure physical adversity as compared to the healthy, and he frequently reduced them to animality. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault wrote that Pinel marked a shift from physical to mental control and oppression, “by practicing a social segregation that would guarantee bourgeois morality a universality of fact and permit it to be imposed as a law upon all forms of insanity.” By bringing physicians into the asylum, the medical enterprise became a moral project.

Charcot produced his hysteria photographs under the influence of a painting created twenty years before his birth, in 1805: Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel Liberating the Madwoman of the Salpêtrière, depicting Doctor Pinel freeing a madwoman from her condition of solitary confinement. The woman being freed from her shackles seems hardly aware that this is the case: She stares off, looking in the general direction of the painter. She emotes little. She does not appear to be in great suffering, and this does not seem to be because she is being freed. She is nothing like the posed, well-lit women in the photographs of the hysterics. There is no pose of passion here, no ecstasy. Her hair and cream muslin dress are not arranged with any particular care. There are no giggle fits, no spasms. But directly below her left arm, which is being lifted by her liberator, we see a grotesque woman pulling her blouse open to expose one breast, her head thrown back. She is clamoring, crying, convulsing. She has already been freed of her chains, and those still enchained reach toward her, desperately. She has not been freed of her hysteria. She is so lost in the spectacle she has created that every onlooker appears to be a director. I think this is the woman-from-hell after whom Charcot modeled his own women when he took over, in his words, “the grand asylum of human misery,” “the living museum of pathology” of the Salpêtrière.

A delivery truck pulled up behind the Quartier des Folles. A passing woman in a lab coat asked me without looking up from her cell phone, Puis-je vous aider?

I was embarrassed to be there, as if I were doing something wrong. The woman had a gap between her two front teeth that could be seen when she smiled—which she did when I was unable to answer her. Bibliothèque Charcot?

Her smile turned into an ah of recognition as she gave me directions. Sick young women, to whom the hysterics’ stories might be somehow personal, sentimental, must go there often.

The amphitheater where Charcot’s lessons were given no longer survives, but his library was donated to the hospital after his death. The books sit awkwardly in a tiny museum within a mid-century structure, where I felt a bit more at ease, alone, among the grass-and-resin scent of the old books—the lignin of old wood-based papers that is so closely related to vanillin. I didn’t know what to ask for. Where might I find a mark, a sense, anything, of Augustine’s living, breathing body? The Salpêtrière has been used unceasingly as a hospital; the ghosts haven’t ever rested.

I felt too fragmented to speak French anymore. I lacked the perspective to decide which way to go. When I walked away from the hospital, not toward anything in particular, it appeared that its landscape was moving, too.

That night, I didn’t want to stay in the hotel room alone, with all the stupid high-flash monochrome party photos of Dash Snow and Chloë Sevigny. I went downstairs to read Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran at the bar, with all the divorcées. I liked their clouds of ridiculous tuberose perfume and heavy Anna Karina kohl. The men hadn’t bothered to dress with as much care, or maybe they had. What I was really doing was waiting for a man to come ask if I minded company and to invite me out for the night, which they always did—I liked this about Paris, the ease of the gendered expectations, not having to try. The serenity of drinking toward an approximation of a desire to spend an evening together.

Soon enough, a man with a drink in both hands introduced himself, said he couldn’t help but notice that my Negroni was running low, and offered me one from his haul. When he asked what I did—even in Paris, one can’t seem to escape the question—I told him I was a dental hygienist. It is the only response I have found that does not invite any follow-up questions; it is the kind of lie I tell all the time. He and I decided to leave the hotel bar to have dinner at a place he knew. As I reached for my wallet—my first mistake—he winced. Then I excused myself to go to the washroom to “powder my nose,” an absurd, antiquated thing to say—my second mistake—where I instead crushed up a painkiller from my little pillbox so I would be able to endure the walk and the flavors of dinner.

In Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the hôtels particuliers have housed the same aristocratic families for generations. I decided against making a joke about class struggle. They’re too pristine, I said, and explained that, having grown up in Southern California, I always suspected that such picturesque scenes might actually be soundstages. He laughed. When I asked for a cab back to the hotel after dinner, he placed his hand on my shoulder, heavily, to let me know he believed I was making a mistake. My third mistake.

Is it my age? he asked, dejected. He must have been about seventy. Many former ballerinas and former models I knew back in LA made a living dating men like him.

No, no, I assured him. I’m just very focused on my novel. These long days working don’t leave me much time to work on it. I closed my eyes when I said the second part, as if, like a prayer, it might feel truer.

My novel! The line has stuck with me since. I use it often. While its authenticity as a romantic rejection might be questioned, it’s more serviceable, more friendly than the actuality—I don’t want anyone near how sick I am. Even now, after my illness has long had a name and, thus, has been called into medically-believed existence, when I speak of it, or hear someone speak in response, I never tell the whole story. On the rare occasions that I’ve tried, I’ve shuffled my feet, fidgeted with my watch, blushed, as though shame were attached to using words. Is it possible to be in pain without transmitting it to others? My sickness has given me the kind of ego that allows me to make someone feel unwanted and then to resent them for walking away.