In André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel Nadja, a man recounts ten days of obsession with the titular character, whom he meets on the street. He is fascinated with her through her vision of the world, which unfolds through discussion of surrealist artists like himself. Later in the book, Nadja is understood to be one of Pinel’s mad patients. After she reveals details about her personal life, the man now fears she will disappoint him with her inability to live up to the fantasy he has built around her. Her symptoms have become so extreme that he must abandon her to forced institutionalization. The narrator then realizes his preference for ruminating on a memory of Nadja in which he can encounter her as a ghost—and better practice the theory of surrealism predicated upon the dreamlike nature of the experience of reality.

Léona Delcourt, the real woman on whom the character of Nadja was based, remained in psychiatric wards until her death in 1941. Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism opens with critical reactions to Nadja by psychiatrists. One of them, Gaëtan de Clérambault, developed a theory of mental automatism in psychotic delirium that led to additional scientific experiments in the physiology of stimulus-response.

Breton, who thought of hysteria as pure psychic automatism, said the condition was “characterized by the subversion of the relationships established between the subject and the moral world . . . It can, from every point of view, be considered as a supreme means of expression.”

The final sentence of Nadja: “Beauty will be convulsive or not be at all.” Augustine’s violent, spastic beauty was an object of fascination for other surrealists as well, who saw hysteria as a state of idealized poetic expression. Her passionate poses were featured on the cover of the eleventh La Révolution surréaliste, a special “Research into Sexuality” issue. Breton called hysteria “the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century.” The surrealists played automatic writing games, exercises in which they wrote “as if” they had conditions like hysteria, attempting to make the unconscious legible to themselves.

They used her for their ends. I am no different, reducing her life to these captured photography sessions. Does any of us know what we want from Augustine—to free her, diagnose her, consume her? To measure her against our own physical deterioration, as I do? In any event, she rejected it all. During the last several months she spent at the hospital, she refused to allow Charcot to hypnotize her, refused to indulge the implicit idea that her submission to the medical gaze was part of a progressive and humane pursuit of knowledge. At this time, there is about her a sudden dimming in the photographs, a bereavement of sorts. She no longer appears a cheerful medical celebrity.