Adam Gould (2 page)

For a man who had always prided himself on being an athlete, these afflictions were painful. To the darling of Paris’s racier drawing and bedrooms, they were like Samson’s loss of hair. Compared, though, to his inability to write, they were less than gnat bites. For years he had swum, hiked, rowed, sailed, cuckolded and rutted with endurance and skill, but writing was what had quickened his
élan vital
. It had prolonged the fleeting moment, kept sensations quick, allowed him to relive his life and try to understand it.

Now it no longer did. His master-talent for pinning perceptions to the page was drying up! He dreamed of dried inkpots. Sticking his pen in them. Failing to. The inkpots then turned into women who – how dull the world was! – were dry too. Impenetrable! He couldn’t ...
Merde
! Was the dullness the world’s fault or his? His of course! His! His brain had grown sluggish, his mind – what? Babbly? Babel-y? Or did he mean ‘blurry’? More and more often now, words evaded him. And what you couldn’t say, you ceased to see. Was ‘blinkered’ the word he wanted? ‘On the blink’? Tantalizing syllables shifted shape in his fumbling brain. ‘Blll ... ank’? That was it! Blanked! No,
blanched
mind? Doctor Blanched? Might it be the morphine? Thoughts, jumbling like broken type, scattered and escaped his grasp. Helpless, when he needed most to take control, he heard himself, once or twice, spout rubbish.

At lunch, last New Year’s Day, at his mother’s villa at Nice, this happened. When it did, the shock on his relatives’ faces so shocked
him
that, to spare them further pain, he jumped from his chair, tore his napkin from his neck, stuffed it in his mouth and ran from the house. The last thing he heard was his mother screaming entreaties that he stay. He doubts he’ll see her again. Or write again. Ever.

He loves her more than anyone in the world. Always has. Always! Which is why he didn’t turn back. It is also why, in the shuddering small hours of the next morning, he put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He was a lucid pessimist who had read his Schopenhauer and took pride in confronting life’s nastiness head – ha! – on. His own life had been more benign than he could have hoped it would be, but now, prematurely, at the age of forty-two, the good times were so clearly over that he pulled the trigger, felt the hot burn of gunpowder on his temple and – and that was all! Nothing more. The magazine was empty. No bullets! His valet had removed them! Baffled, then enraged, but still intent on doing what he had set out to do, Guy put his fist through a windowpane, located his carotid artery and, using a splinter from the broken pane, began to cut his throat – only to be rescued, farcically, all over again, by the kind, dim and obtusely devoted valet.

All that sangfroid for nothing! That effortful screwing up of courage! No wonder Guy went mad. He was caught in what could have been a script for a child’s puppet show. ‘Bang, I’m dead! No! Haha! Here I’m back. Thwack! Thump. Fizzle! Hack the artery! Ow! The splinter broke!
Merde
! Shit and re-shit!’ ‘Life’, like puppet shows, ‘consists,’ as Guy himself wrote, warningly, not all that long ago, to a very young woman, ‘of boredom, wretchedness and farce.’
Misère
!

Did he believe it then? No. Now he does, for all three have caught up with him! Farce first! Farce and indignity! Those are what take over when you lose control!

Crunching up and down the frost-glazed paths of Dr Blanche’s gardens, he breaks ice shards under his boots. They mimic the bright splinter in his memory. In clear-eyed moments he can see his madness. When he does he is free of it: sane, distanced and in control. He can’t be
sure
he is seeing it, though, or which memories to trust. Lucidity trembles. Fiction is on the loose. With any luck his worst memories may prove to have been hallucinations.

The scar on his throat, though, is real enough. And so is the warder who is keeping watch on him. So he knows that he has ended up where he had planned never to be, and wouldn’t be now if that interfering fool hadn’t foiled his plan. He curses wellwishers!

On the other hand, could the valet have been right? Might a cure be effected? Even now? It is not five years since this same man, François, was marvelling at his master’s stamina in bed and at his desk. What an appetite in those days! What industry! While now ... François too is keeping watch, but furtively lest the sight of him upset poor Monsieur Guy.

‘Don’t let him see you,’ is Dr Blanche’s order. The mad, he explains, can ‘associate their trouble with the very people who try hardest to help them. They don’t like doctors either,’ adds Blanche. ‘We put up with that. It’s part of our vocation.’

So François hides indoors, peering through the slats of a shutter at his frail, hoop-backed, thin and diminished master who until recently drew women the way honey draws flies. Maybe the greedy creatures did for him! Sucked the life out of him as they sucked his juices! Like ticks! Right from the start François feared just this. He’d have shoo’d them away if it had been up to him which, unfortunately, it never was. Judging by their insistence, there must have been a sad dearth of men ready and able to satisfy the harpies! Reminiscently, he shakes his head. The things they got up to! François, who is just a bit younger than Monsieur Guy, was pleasantly shocked. Some of their practices, well ... In Belgium, which is where he comes from, he doubts if anyone ever saw the like! Or heard of it! Woman after woman used to come to Monsieur Guy’s door, heavily veiled, propelled by uterine ardours, sly but avid, pushful, yet always afraid to show her face! Titled ladies in some cases, and almost certainly married! Working for Monsieur Guy taught you a thing or two about human nature and the ways of our betters. Oh indeed! Some left clues: coded notes, impudent or carelessly forgotten visiting cards and gifts with indiscreet endearments. Underwear. More than once, when there was no time to lace them back into their corsets, these got left behind and had to be hidden, since it wouldn’t do for one lady to find another one’s under things. Not that some weren’t ready to engage in
parties carrées
and the like! Foursomes! The trysts were in the
garçonnière
, in one of Monsieur Guy’s yachts and in out-of-the-way hotels. François kept a half-anxious count and worried even then that his master was wearing out his health. But in the old days the writing too went ahead. Thirty-seven handwritten pages in one day! François noted those numbers approvingly. Good stuff too. That was the year Monsieur Guy published that cruel but moving novel
Pierre et Jean
, which he based on a news item he’d found in the press.

It was the press which used to provide him with raw material, with work – he often produced so much of it that he’d have to sign his stories with different names – and, of course, with fame. His novel
Bel-Ami
was about a journalist and, just as the book showed up the newspaper world, that world has now started sinking its claws into him. With his own eyes, François has seen newsmen hanging about the village of Passy, asking questions and buying drinks for locals. Vultures! He has warned Dr Blanche, who says he’ll take measures. Given half a chance, François himself would like to wring their prying necks.

L
’
Intransigeant

12 January 1892

Is there really no better way to stop Guy de Maupassant taking ether and opium than by handing him over to the three-star doctor who is getting enormous publicity from all this? Won’t any benefit the writer gains from sobering up be undone by the shock of finding himself interned in a well-known lunatic asylum?

The press went to town on the thing. Perhaps it amuses Monsieur Guy’s
confrères
to use his own weapon against him? It is a fiction to call him a drug addict. His use of ether was medicinal! He took it for his headaches.

This morning Dr Blanche called a staff meeting. It was attended by his assistants, Drs Meuriot and Grout, along with a warder called Baron who looked after Maupassant, and by Adam Gould who, thanks to two years’ diligence and the goodwill inherited from Uncle Charles, was fast becoming the aging neurologist’s right-hand man.

The director was indignant. Something must be done about the press. Here. Read that. He laid a bundle of papers on the table:
Le Gaulois
,
Gil Blas
,
Le Figaro
,
L
’
Écho de Paris
... Flicking through them, he said he was less bothered by the lies than by the accurate bits. Some unnamed doctor – who? – had clearly discussed our new patient with unbuttoned candour to the hacks. Here, listen to what was picked up by
L
’
Écho de la semaine
. ‘He keeps asking for his thoughts,’ the leech had told the
Écho
, ‘and rummaging for them as one might for a handkerchief. “My thoughts,” he begs. “Has no one seen them?” They have escaped him and fly about like butterflies whose flight he cannot track.’

‘That,’ said Blanche, ‘is more or less exactly what Maupassant
is
saying. He talks about butterflies and the difficulty of pinning them to the page. Someone from here must have leaked gossip. I don’t for a moment believe that it was anyone in this room. It could be a gardener or a chambermaid or, although I hope not, it could be one of the warders. But talking to the press has to stop. Is that clear? Yes? Well, until further notice, nobody is to go in or out without good reason, and the gates must be kept locked. It would do our patient no good at all to read this sort of thing in the papers. And we can’t refuse to let him see them. Other patients get them, so how keep them from him? I’ve been wondering whether we should appeal to the editors to show more discretion? And sympathy? After all Maupassant did good work for them!’

Dr Meuriot had a wry smile for this. As Dr Blanche’s second-in-command, he made a point of not being a yes-man. Indeed, he exuded authority, for his face, already enlarged by a fuzz of mutton-chop whiskers, was gaining height as his hair receded. ‘I,’ he said, ‘favour lying low. A row could bring this establishment into disrepute.’ He dismissed Dr Blanche’s idea of printing a statement to the effect that Maupassant was well enough to read what was written about him. ‘Our good-hearted director underestimates the scribblers’ venom,’ he opined. ‘Not everyone is as open-minded as he. We could easily get their backs up.’

‘No
reproach
need be implied,’ said Blanche, ‘if we print it as a news item. We needn’t make a direct appeal. Just say he reads the papers. You don’t think they’d twig?’

‘Oh, I do think they’d twig,’ cried Meuriot, ‘and feel challenged and reply, and what good would that do us?’ He sighed, then lowered his voice to say he hoped the director would take in good part what he felt obliged to say now, which was that
friends
could be the source of the leak. Dr Blanche frequented drawing rooms, did he not, where old acquaintances of Maupassant’s asked him for news? Unsuspecting as he was, he probably supplied it. ‘That
could
be where the papers got their facts.’

There was an embarrassed pause.

Then Dr Blanche said, yes, he too must be more careful, and Dr Meuriot made appeasing hand gestures while the others looked at their feet and said nothing, being in doubt as to who exactly was in charge. Dr Blanche, like his father before him, was the nursing home’s director. Distinguished but unworldly, he had never bothered to buy the premises in which his family and patients were housed, then one day found to his shock that, behind his back, Dr Meuriot had done so ‘for a song’. That was some time ago; the shock had faded, and the two managed to jog along, collaborating more or less amicably, but moments like this put a strain on their goodwill.

Employees too felt the strain. Adam especially, since he had no particular training and knew that once the director retired there would be no place here for him. And Dr Blanche was seventy-two.

As they left the meeting Dr Blanche drew Adam aside and asked him to spend time with Maupassant, who was in a black despair and needed company.

‘You’re young and that’s in your favour. Try your charm on him. Soothe. Joke. Tell him stories. Have you read any of his books? You have? Jolly good! Praise them. We’re trying to give him fewer sedatives. Monseigneur de Belcastel is expecting a visitor this afternoon, so you’ll be free. A vicomte de Sauvigny.’

By now Adam was used to the monsignor’s ways. The prelate – lean and handsome despite his scar – must once have been gregarious. Even now he received visits, often from men who looked like ex-officers and no doubt shared a common allegiance since, when they were expected, a scatter of objects was apt to transform his room. A silken-tasselled, showily scabbarded sword, inscribed in one of the less familiar dead languages, would be lying conspicuously about, while on his prie-dieu a missal bound in blue and stamped with royal lilies invariably spilled a stream of devotional pictures no bigger than playing cards; a crown of thorns embraced the royal arms of France; the limbs of a crucifix sprouted further lilies; portraits of the last – now dead – legitimist Pretender and of the live, but less loved, Orleanist one flanked those of a weeping Virgin and bleeding Sacred Heart. Seen through the bars of a cage, the late pope, portrayed as a prisoner of the Italians, figured among the suffering. After each visit, the props would disappear.

Belcastel did not hide these, but neither did he want help with their arrangement. His ritual was private.

It interested Adam, for, in his Irish childhood, politics and religion had blended in just this way. Back then, sprigs of withered ‘palm’ – actually spruce – locks of hair and the like had been as apt to commemorate patriots as saints, and so the monsignor’s display revived memories as cosy as old toys. Some were a touch sardonic, for Adam’s papa, a pugnacious man who had sat as an MP in the Westminster Parliament, had been prone to mock the glorification of failure – and here it was again.

This father had been an impressive figure in his son’s early years. He was fearless on racetrack and hunting field, and, when electioneering, could discomfit most hecklers. Inured to long odds, he tried during the land war, which broke out in 1879, to speak both for his fellow landlords and their increasingly desperate and turbulent tenants. Neither group trusted him of course. Mating nags and thoroughbreds, mocked indignant friends, might get short-term results when breeding horseflesh, but in politics it amounted to disloyalty. He remained unabashed.