Madame Hermet
Madmen fascinate me. These beings live in a mysterious land of fantastic dreams, in that impenetrable cloud of insanity where all that they have seen on earth, all that they have loved, all that they have done, lives again for them in an imaginary existence outside all the laws that govern the world and order human thought.
For them the impossible does not exist, the unlikely disappears, the fairy world becomes the natural world, and the supernatural familiar. Logic, that ancient barrier, reason, that ancient wall, good sense, that ancient balustrade of the mind, is broken, shattered, demolished by their imagination, which has been loosed into freedom, has escaped into the realms of fantasy to which no bounds are set, and rushes forward in fabulous leaps without let or hindrance. For them everything happens and everything can happen. They make no efforts to conquer events, overcome resistances, surmount obstacles. A mere whim of their fantasy-creating will allows them to become princes, emperors or gods, to possess all the riches of the world, all the good things of life, allows them to enjoy all pleasures, allows them to be always strong, always beautiful, always young, always loved. Of all creatures on this earth, they alone are happy, since for them reality no longer exists. I like to hang over their vagabond minds, as one hangs over an abyss in whose depths boils an unknown torrent, come one knows not whence and going one knows not whither.
But it avails us nothing to hang over these ravines, since we could never know whence comes that stream or whither it goes. After all, it is only a stream, like the streams that run in broad daylight, and a sight of it would teach us very little.
It avails us as little to hang over the minds of madmen, for their most fantastic ideas are, in effect, no more than ideas already known to us, made strange only because they are no longer shackled by Reason. That capricious spring confounds and amazes us because we do not see the place of its rising. Doubtless a little stone dropped in its course is enough to produce these whirlpools. Nevertheless, madmen fascinate me, and I keep going back to them, attracted in spite of myself by this commonplace mystery of insanity.
But one day, as I was visiting one of their asylums, the doctor who was escorting me said:
“Come, I’ll show you an interesting case.”
And he opened a cell in which a woman of about forty years of age, still beautiful, was seated in a big armchair, gazing fixedly at her face in a small hand-glass.
As soon as she saw us, she stood up, ran to the farther side of the room to get a veil thrown down on a chair, very carefully swarthed her face in it, then returned, replying to our greetings by a sign of her head.
“Well,” said the doctor, “how are you this morning?”
She uttered a deep sigh.
“Oh, ill, very ill, doctor, the marks get worse every day.”
He replied with an air of conviction:
“No, certainly not, I assure you that you’re mistaken.”
She drew close to him to murmur:
“No. I’m sure of it. I’ve counted ten more marks this morning, three on the right cheek, four on the left cheek, and three on my forehead. It’s frightful, frightful. I daren’t let anyone see me now, not even my son, no, not even he! I’m ruined, I’m disfigured for life.”
She sank back into her armchair and began to sob.
The doctor took a chair, seated himself near her, and in a gentle, comforting voice said:
“Come now, let me look, I assure you it’s nothing. By a slight cauterising, I can make them all disappear.”
She shook her head, without saying a word. He tried to touch her veil, but she grasped it in both hands with such violence that her fingers went through it.
He began afresh to exhort and reassure her.
“Come, now, you know quite well that I remove the ugly pockmarks from your skin every time and that you can’t see them at all when I have attended to them. If you don’t show them to me, I can’t cure you.”
She murmured:
“I’m quite willing to let you look again but I don’t know this gentleman who is with you.”
“He is a doctor too, who can attend to you even better than I can.”
Then she uncovered her face, but her fear and her emotion, her shame at being seen, made her blush even over her throat, to the point where her gown covered it. She lowered her eyes, turned her face now to the right and now to the left, to escape our gaze, and stammered:
“Oh, it makes me suffer agonies to let you see me like this. It’s horrible, isn’t it? Isn’t it horrible?”
I looked at her in the utmost amazement, for she had nothing on her face, not a mark, not a stain, not a sign nor a scar.
She turned towards me, keeping her eyes lowered, and said to me:
“It was through nursing my son that I contracted this frightful disease. I saved him but I am disfigured. I gave my beauty to my poor child. Well, I did my duty, and my conscience is at rest. If I suffer, only God knows it.”
The doctor had taken from his pocket a slender watercolour brush.
“Allow me,” said he, “I’ll put it all right for you.”
She turned to him her right cheek, and he began to lay light touches on it, as if he were putting small dabs of paint on it. He did the same to the left cheek, then to the chin, then the forehead; then he cried:
“Look, it’s all gone, all gone.”
She took up her glass, gazed at herself for a long time with a searching intensity, a harrowing intensity, a savagely concentrated mental effort to discover something, then she sighed:
“No. There’s very little to see now. Thank you very much indeed.”
The doctor rose. He took leave of her, ushered me out and followed me; and as soon as the door was closed, said:
“I’ll tell you that poor woman’s dreadful story.”
Her name is Mme. Hermet. She was very beautiful, a real coquette, loved of many, and full of the joy of life.
She was one of those women whose sole consolation in life is derived from and their conduct dictated by their beauty and their desire to please.
The unremitting anxiety to preserve her freshness, the care of her face, her hands, teeth, of every part of her body that she could display, absorbed all her time and all her attention.
She became a widow, with one son. The child was brought up in the same way as are all children of much admired women. She loved him, however.
He grew up, and she grew old. Whether or not she saw the fatal moment coming, I don’t know. Did she, like so many others, gaze every morning for hours and hours at the skin that used to be so delicate, so clear and fresh, and now is wrinkling a little under the eyes, creasing itself in a thousand lines, that are imperceptible now, but will deepen and deepen, day by day, month by month? And did she see, more and more strongly marked, advancing with slow relentless certainty, the long lines graven on the forehead, those thin serpents whose progress nothing halts? Did she endure the torture, the abominable torture, of the looking-glass, of the small silver hand-glass that she could not resolve to leave on the table, then threw down in anger, and a moment later picked up again, to see once more, ever nearer and nearer, the hateful silent ravages of approaching age? Did she shut herself up ten, twenty times a day, leaving, for no reason, the drawing room where her friends were chatting, to go up to her bedroom and, safeguarded by bolts and locks, gaze again on the destruction at work in the ripened fading flesh, to examine despairingly the hardly perceptible advance that so far no one else seems to notice but of which she herself is bitterly aware? She knows where the most serious ravages are, where the tooth of age bites deepest. And the glass, the small, quite round glass in its frame of chased silver, says dreadful things to her, for it speaks, it seems to laugh, it rails on her and predicts all that is coming to pass, all the miseries of her body, and the atrocious torture of her mind that will endure to the day of her death, which will be that of her deliverance.
Did she weep, distracted, on her knees, her forehead on the ground, and pray, pray, pray to Him who kills His creatures thus, giving them youth only to make age the more bitter, and lending them beauty only to take it back almost at once; did she pray Him, implore Him, to grant to her what He had never granted to anyone, to allow her to keep until her last day, charm and freshness and grace? Then, realising that in vain does she implore the implacable Unknown who adds year to year in endless number, did she roll with writhing arms on the carpet of her room, did she beat her forehead on its furniture and stifle in her throat her frightful despairing cries?
She must have endured these tortures. For this is what happened:
One day (she was then thirty-five years old) her son, aged fifteen, fell ill.
He took to his bed before the doctors had been able to diagnose the cause of his illness or its nature. An abbé, his tutor, watched over him, hardly leaving his side, while Mme. Hermet came morning and evening to hear his report.
She entered in the morning in a rest gown, smiling, already scented, and asked, from the door:
“Well, George, are you getting better?”
The tall youngster, crimson, his face swollen, and wasted by the fever, would answer:
“Yes, mammie, a little better.”
She lingered a few moments in the bedroom, examining the bottles of medicine and making little grimaces of disgust, then suddenly cried: “Oh, I was forgetting something very important,” and she took herself off, running, leaving behind her the delicate fragrance of her morning toilet.
At night she appeared in her evening gown, in a still greater hurry, for she was always late, and she had just time to ask:
“Well, what did the doctor say?”
The abbé replied:
“He’s not sure yet, madame.”
But, one evening, the abbé replied:
“Madam, your son has taken smallpox.”
She uttered a loud cry of fear and rushed away. When her maid came to her room next morning the first thing she noticed in the room was a strong smell of burnt sugar, and she found her mistress, wide-awake, her face pale for lack of sleep and shaking with anguish in her bed.
As soon as the shutters were open Mme. Hermet asked:
“How is George?”
“Oh, not at all well today, madame.”
She did not get up until midday, ate two eggs with a cup of tea, as if she herself were ill, then she went out and consulted a chemist as to the best methods of keeping off the infection of smallpox.
She did not return until dinnertime, laden with phials, and shut herself at once in her room, where she soaked herself in disinfectants.
The abbé was waiting for her in the dining room. As soon as she caught sight of him she cried, in a voice full of emotion:
“Well?”
“Oh, no better. The doctor is very anxious.”
She began to cry, and could eat nothing, so wretched was she.
The next day, at dawn, she sent for news: the report was no better and she spent the whole day in her room, where small braziers were smoking and filling the room with powerful odours. Moreover, her maid declared that she heard her moaning all the evening.
A whole week passed in this way: she did nothing at all but go out for an hour or two to take the air, towards the middle of the afternoon.
She asked for news every hour now, and sobbed when each report was worse.
On the morning of the eleventh day, the abbé was announced, entered her room, his face grave and pale, and declining the chair that she offered him, said:
“Madame, your son is very ill, and he wants to see you.”
She flung herself on her knees, crying:
“Oh, my God, oh, my God, I daren’t! My God, my God! help me!”
The priest answered:
“The doctor holds out very little hope, madame, and George is waiting for you.”
Then he went out.
Two hours later, as the boy, feeling himself near death, asked again for his mother, the abbé went back to her room and found her still on her knees, still weeping and repeating:
“I won’t. … I won’t. … I am too frightened … I won’t. …”
He tried to persuade her, to stiffen her resolution, to lead her out. He succeeded only in giving her a fit of hysteria which lasted for a long time and made her scream.
The doctor came again towards evening, was told of her cowardice and declared that he himself would fetch her, by persuasion or force. But when, after having exhausted all his arguments, he put his arm around her to carry her off to her son, she seized the door and clung to it so desperately that no one could tear her away. Then, released, she prostrated herself at the doctor’s feet, begging for pardon, and accusing herself of wickedness. She kept crying: “Oh, he’s not going to die, tell me he’s not going to die, I implore you, tell him that I love him, that I adore him. …”
The boy lay at the point of death. Realising that he only had a few moments left, he begged them to persuade his mother to say goodbye to him. With strange insight that the dying sometimes possess, he had realised the truth, divined it, and said: “If she is afraid to come in, just beg her to come along the balcony as far as my window so that at least I can see her and say goodbye to her by a look, since I may not kiss her.”
The doctor and the abbé went back once more to this woman. “You will run no risk at all,” they declared, “since there will be glass between you and him.”
She consented to come, covered her head, took a bottle of smelling-salts, made three steps along the balcony, then suddenly, hiding her face in her hands, she moaned: “No … no … I shall never dare to look at him … never … I’m too ashamed … I’m too afraid … no … I can’t.”
They tried to drag her along, but she held with both hands to the bars and uttered such wails that the people passing by in the street lifted their heads.
And the dying boy waited, his eyes turned towards this window, he waited, putting off death until he should have looked one last time on that gentle beloved face, his mother’s blessed face.
He waited for a long time, and night fell. Then he turned his face to the wall and never spoke again.
When day broke, he was dead. The next day, she was a madwoman.