MADELEINE LOOKS FOR M. Pujol. She is, however, too short. Even hopping up and down, she still cannot see through the small, paned windows at the top of every door, windows through which the director can peer solicitously at the patient residing within. She has worked her way down the corridor, and every window, it turns out, has been constructed at the same impossible height.
Madeleine wishes to see the madmen and madwomen who live inside the hospital. She expects that behind each door there exists an amazing affliction: the Tigress, who paces her cell and feasts upon raw livers; the Dromedary Boy, who fancies himself capable of drinking a well dry; the Walrus Woman, who wept so profusely, and at so little provocation, that her eyeteeth grew to the very length and consistency of tusks. A man fluent in eleven languages, yet unable to communicate with anyone. A girl who cannot seem to stop sleeping, who rustles and stirs but never wakes.
The photographer, however, is six and a half inches taller than Madeleine, a height from which he can peer through the windows, only to discover the most ordinary of inmates. To visit this hospital, he thinks, is to visit the catacombs and sewers of Paris; it is to stroll down their broad avenues, admiring the symmetry of their arches. Baron Hausmann has constructed, underground, a city nearly identical to the one above: airy, harmonious, prosaic—a place that invites slow perambulation, the opening of shops, the planning of excursions. Touring through this subterranean city, one is struck by the decorative arrangement of skulls, set into the walls like Portuguese tiles, and the shininess of the piping through which the sewage rushes.
And here, in the hospital? The Walrus Woman is suffering from neurasthenia; the Man from Babel is afflicted by dementia praecox; the Tigress, a brain gone spongy from syphilis.