Berthe
My old friend—sometimes one has friends much older than oneself—my old friend Doctor Bonnet had often invited me to stay with him at his house at Riom. I did not know Auvergne at all, and I decided to go and see him about the middle of the summer of 1876.
I arrived on the morning train, and the first figure I saw upon the station platform was the doctor’s. He was dressed in grey, and wore a round black broad-brimmed soft felt hat, whose very high crown narrowed as it rose, like the chimney of an anthracite stove; it was a true Auvergne hat, and positively smelt of charcoal-burning. Clad thus, the doctor had the appearance of an old young man, with his slender body wrapped in the light-coloured coat, and his large head with its white hair.
He embraced me with the manifest pleasure of a provincial greeting the arrival of a long-desired friend. Extending his arm and pointing all round him he exclaimed proudly:
“Here is Auvergne.”
I saw nothing but a line of mountains in front of me, whose summits, like truncated cones, must have been extinct volcanoes.
Then, raising his finger towards the name of the town written upon the front of the station, he said:
“Riom, fatherland of magistrates, pride of the law courts, which should rather have been the fatherland of doctors.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” he answered with a laugh. “Turn the name round and you have ‘mori’—to die … That’s why I installed myself in this neighbourhood, young man.”
And, delighted with his jest, he led me away, rubbing his hands.
As soon as I had swallowed a cup of coffee, I had to go and see the old city. I admired the chemist’s house, and the other notable houses, all black, but as pretty as toy houses, with their fronts of carved stone. I admired the statue of the Virgin, patron saint of butchers, and even heard, in this connection, the story of an amusing adventure which I will relate some other day, when Doctor Bonnet said to me:
“Now I must beg five minutes in which to go and see a patient, and then I will take you up the hill of Châtel-Guyon, so as to show you, before lunch, the general view of the town and of the whole range of the Puy-de-Dôme. You can wait on the pavement; I’m only going straight up and down again.”
He left me opposite one of those old provincial mansions, dark, closed, silent, gloomy. This one seemed to me to have a particularly melancholy physiognomy, and I soon discovered the reason. All the large windows on the first floor were blocked up to half their height by stout wooden shutters. Only the top halves opened, as though someone had wished to prevent the creatures shut up in this vast stone box from seeing into the street.
When the doctor came down again, I told him what I had noticed.
“You were not mistaken,” he replied; “the poor creature shut up in there must never see what is going on outside. She’s a madwoman, or rather an idiot, or an imbecile—what you Normans call a ‘Niente.’
“Yes, it’s a sad story, and an extraordinary pathological case into the bargain. Would you like me to tell it you?”
I told him yes.
“Well,” he went on, “here it is, then. Twenty years ago now, the owners of that house, my employers, had a child, a girl, just like any other girl.
“But I soon saw that although the body of the little creature was developing admirably, her intelligence was remaining dormant.
“She walked at a very early age, but she absolutely refused to speak. At first I thought her deaf; then, later, I found out that she could hear perfectly, but did not understand. Violent noises made her tremble; they frightened her, but she could never trace the cause of them.
“She grew up; she was superb, and dumb, dumb through lack of intelligence. I tried every means to bring a gleam of light into her brain; nothing was of avail. I fancied that she recognised her nurse; once weaned, she did not recognise her mother. She never knew how to speak that word, the first uttered by children, the last murmured by soldiers dying on the battlefield: ‘Mother.’ Sometimes she attempted inarticulate mutterings, but nothing more.
“When the weather was fine, she laughed all the time, uttering gentle cries like the twittering of a bird; when it rained, she wept and groaned in a melancholy, terrifying way like the mourning of dogs howling round a corpse.
“She liked to roll in the grass like a young animal, and run about like a mad creature, and every morning she clapped her hands if she saw the sun coming into her room. When the window was opened, she clapped her hands and moved about in her bed, so as to make them dress her at once.
“She seemed to draw no distinction between people, between her mother and her servant, between her father and me, between the coachman and the cook.
“I was fond of her unhappy parents, and went to see them almost every day. I often dined with them, which made me notice that Berthe (she had been named Berthe) appeared to recognise the dishes and prefer some to others.
“She was twelve years old at that time. She looked like a girl of eighteen, and was taller than I am.
“So the idea came into my head of developing her greed, and of attempting by this means to introduce a sense of difference into her mind, of forcing her, by the difference between tastes, by the scale of flavours, if not to think, at least to make instinctive distinctions, which would be if nothing else a physical stirring of her brain.
“In appealing to her senses, and carefully choosing those which would best serve our purpose, we were bound to produce a sort of recoil of the body upon the intelligence, and thus gradually augment the insentient working of her brain.
“One day, therefore, I set in front of her two plates, one of soup, one of very sweet vanilla custard. I made her taste them alternately. Then I left her free to make a choice. She ate the plateful of custard.
“I soon made her very greedy, so greedy that she seemed to have nothing in her head but the idea, or rather the desire, of eating. She recognised dishes perfectly, holding out her hand towards those which she liked and eagerly seizing them. She cried when they were taken away.
“Then I had the notion of teaching her to come to the dining room at the sound of the bell. It took a long time, but I succeeded. In her vague understanding became firmly established a connection between the sound and the taste, a relation between two senses, an appeal from one to the other, and consequently a kind of concatenation of ideas, if one can call this sort of instinctive link between two organic functions an idea.
“I carried my experiment still further, and taught her—with what pains!—to recognise mealtimes on the dial of the clock.
“For a long time I was unable to call her attention to the hands, but I succeeded in making her notice the striking mechanism. The method I employed was simple: I stopped the ringing of the bell, and everyone rose to go to table when the little brass hammer struck twelve.
“I tried in vain to teach her to count the strokes. Every time she heard the chime she ran to the door; but little by little she must have realised that all the chimes had not the same value with regard to meals; and her eye, guided by her ear, was often fixed upon the dial.
“Noticing this, I took care to go every day at twelve and at six, and as soon as it came to the moment she was waiting for, I placed my finger on the figure twelve and on the figure six. I soon observed that she was following attentively the advance of the little brass hands, which I had often pushed round in her presence.
“She had understood! Or, it would be truer to say, she had grasped it. I had succeeded in awakening in her the knowledge, or rather the sensation, of time, in the same way as one succeeds with carp, though they have not the advantage of clocks, by feeding them at exactly the same moment every day.
“Once this result had been attained, all the timepieces in the house occupied her attention to the exclusion of everything else. She spent her life in looking at them, listening to them, waiting for the hours. A rather funny incident happened. The strike of a pretty Louis XVI clock, that was hanging over the head of her bed, ran down, and she noticed it. For twenty minutes she stared at the hands, waiting for ten o’clock to strike. But when the hand had passed the figure, she was left bewildered at hearing nothing, so bewildered that she remained sitting there, stirred no doubt by one of those strong emotions which lay hold on us in the face of great catastrophes. And she had the curious patience to sit in front of that little instrument until eleven o’clock, to see what would happen. Again she heard nothing, very naturally. Then, seized abruptly with the mad rage of a creature deceived and tricked, or with the terror inspired by a frightful mystery, or with the furious impatience of a passionate creature confronted by an obstacle, she seized the tongs from the fireplace and struck the clock with such force that she smashed it to pieces instantly.
“Her brain worked then, and calculated, in an obscure way, it is true, and within a very limited range, for I could not make her distinguish between people as she did between hours. In order to produce a stirring of intelligence in her mind, it was necessary to appeal to her passions, in the physical sense of the word.
“We soon had another proof of this; alas! it was a terrible one.
“She had grown into a superb creature; she was a true type of the race, an admirable stupid Venus.
“She was now sixteen, and I have rarely seen such perfection of form, suppleness, and regularity of features. I said she was a Venus; so she was, a fair, full-figured, vigorous Venus, with large eyes, clear and empty, blue like flax-flowers, and a large mouth with round, greedy, sensual lips, a mouth made for kisses.
“One morning her father came into my room with a curious expression, and sat down without even replying to my greeting.
“ ‘I want to speak to you about a very serious matter,’ he said. ‘Could … Berthe get married?’
“I started with surprise.
“ ‘Berthe get married!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s impossible!’
“ ‘Yes,’ he resumed, ‘I know … but think, doctor … you see … perhaps … we had hoped … if she had children … it would be a great shock for her, a great happiness … and who knows whether motherhood might not awaken her intelligence?’
“I was very perplexed. It was true. It was possible that the novelty of the experience, the wonderful maternal instinct which throbs in the hearts of beasts as strongly as in the hearts of women, which makes the hen fling herself upon the jaws of the dog in order to protect her little ones, might lead to a revolution, a violent disturbance in that dormant brain, might even set going the motionless mechanism of her mind.
“Suddenly, too, I remembered an example from my own experience. Some years previously I had owned a little bitch, a retriever, so stupid that I could get nothing out of her. She had puppies, and became in one day, not intelligent, but almost the equal of many poorly developed dogs.
“I had scarcely perceived this possibility before the longing increased in me to get Berthe married, not so much out of friendship for her and for her poor parents as out of scientific curiosity. What would happen? It was a strange problem.
“So I said to the father:
“ ‘You may be right … we might try … try by all means … but … but … you’ll never find a man who’ll consent to it.’
“ ‘I have found one,’ he said in a low voice.
“I was amazed.
“ ‘A decent fellow?’ I stammered. ‘A man in your own walk of life?’
“ ‘Yes … absolutely,’ he replied.
“ ‘Ah. … And … might I ask you his name?’
“ ‘I was just coming to tell you and ask your advice. It is Monsieur Gaston du Boys de Lucelles.’
“I nearly exclaimed: ‘The swine!’ but I kept my mouth shut, and after a pause I murmured:
“ ‘Yes, quite all right. I see no obstacle.’
“The poor man shook my hand.
“ ‘They shall be married next month,’ he said.
“Monsieur Gaston du Boys de Lucelles was a young scamp of good family who had consumed his paternal inheritance and had run into debt in a thousand disreputable ways; he was now hunting for a new method of obtaining money.
“He had found this one.
“He was a good-looking lad, well set up, but a rake, one of the loathsome tribe of provincial rakes. He seemed to give promise of being an adequate husband, and one that an allowance would easily remove again.
“He came to the house to press his suit and show himself off before the beautiful idiot, whom he seemed to like. He brought her flowers, kissed her hands, sat at her feet and gazed at her with tender eyes; but she took no notice of any of his attentions, and in no way distinguished him from any of the people among whom she lived.
“The marriage took place.
“You will understand to what a degree my curiosity was inflamed.
“The next day I went to see Berthe, to judge from her face whether any inner part of her had been stirred. But I found her just the same as on other days, solely preoccupied with the clock and dinner. Her husband, on the contrary, seemed very fond of her, and tried to rouse her gaiety and affection by little teasing games such as one plays with kittens.
“He had found nothing better.
“I then started to pay frequent visits to the newly married couple, and I soon perceived that the young woman recognised her husband and directed upon him the greedy looks which hitherto she had lavished only upon sweet things to eat.
“She followed his movements, distinguished his step on the stairs, or in a neighbouring room, clapped her hands when he came in, and her transfigured countenance burned with a flame of profound happiness and desire.
“She loved him with all her body, with all her soul, her poor feeble soul, with all her heart, the poor heart of a grateful animal.
“She was truly an admirable innocent picture of simple passion, of passion at once carnal and modest, such as nature had set in human beings before man complicated and distorted it with all the subtleties of sentiment.
“As for the man, he quickly wearied of the beautiful, passionate, dumb creature. He no longer spent more than a few hours of each day with her, finding it enough to devote his nights to her.
“And she began to suffer.
“From morning to night she waited for him, her eyes fixed on the clock, not even paying attention to meals, for he always went away for his meals, to Clermont, Châtel-Guyon, Royat, anywhere so as not to be at home.
“She grew thin.
“Every other thought, every other desire, every other interest, every other vague hope, vanished from her mind; the hours in which she did not see him became for her hours of terrible torment. Soon he began to sleep away from her. He spent his nights at the Casino at Royat with women, coming home early at the first gleam of day.
“She refused to go to bed before he returned. She stayed motionless on a chair, her eyes vaguely fixed on the little brass hands which turned round and round in slow, regular progress, round the china dial whereon the hours were inscribed.
“She heard the distant trotting of his horse, and would start up with a bound; then, when he came into the room, she would raise her fingers to the clock with a ghostly gesture, as though to say to him: ‘Look how late it is!’ He began to be afraid in the presence of this loving, jealous idiot; he became possessed of a slow resentment, as an animal might be. One night he struck her.
“I was sent for. She was screaming in a terrible fit of grief, rage, passion, I knew not what. How can one tell what is going on in these rudimentary brains?
“I calmed her with injections of morphine; and I forbade her ever to see the man again, for I realised that the marriage would inevitably end in her death.
“Then she went mad! Yes, my dear fellow, that idiot girl went mad. She thinks of him always, and waits for him. She waits for him all day and all night, every moment, waking or sleeping, perpetually. As I saw her growing thinner and thinner, and as her obstinate gaze never left the faces of the clocks, I had all these instruments for measuring time removed from the house. Thus I have taken from her the possibility of counting the hours, and of forever searching her dim memory for the moment at which once upon a time he had been wont to come home. I hope in the long run to kill the remembrance of it in her, and to extinguish the spark of reason that I took such trouble to set alight.
“The other day I tried an experiment. I offered her my watch. She took it and studied it for some time; then she began to scream in a terrible way, as though the sight of the little instrument had suddenly reawakened the memory that was beginning to slumber.
“She is thin in these days, pitifully thin, with shining hollow eyes. She walks up and down unceasingly, like a caged beast.
“I have had two bars put on the windows, have put up high screens, and have fixed the chairs to the floor, to prevent her from looking into the street to see if he is coming back.
“Oh, the poor parents! What a life they have and will have had!”
We had arrived at the top of the hill; the doctor turned round and said to me:
“Look at Riom from here.”
The sombre town wore the aspect of an ancient walled city. In the background, as far as the eye could reach, stretched a green, wooded plain, dotted with villages and towns, and drowned in a thin blue vapour which made the horizon a delight to the eyes. On the right, in the distance, was a line of high mountains with a succession of peaks, rounded or cut off sharply as with a sword-cut.
The doctor began to enumerate the places and peaks, telling me the history of each.
But I did not listen to him; I thought only of the mad woman, saw nothing but her. She seemed to hover like a melancholy ghost over all this wide country.
“What has become of the husband?” I asked abruptly.
My friend, somewhat surprised, answered after a pause:
“He’s living at Royat on the allowance made to him. He’s happy; he leads a gay life.”
As we were walking slowly homewards, both of us saddened and silent, an English dogcart passed us from behind, a fast-trotting thoroughbred in the shafts.
The doctor gripped my arm.
“There he is,” he said.
I saw nothing but a grey felt hat, tilted over one ear, above a pair of broad shoulders, disappearing in a cloud of dust.