Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers (20 page)

Ever your loving and grateful daughter, Constance

PS. I do not know when I shall be able to take this parcel to the post office. Oscar and his friend are just returned – with a Catholic priest in tow! – and they are demanding both breakfast and my complete attention. They have been out all night, under the full moon, searching for vampires! Oscar tells me that it was
you,
dear mother, who first introduced him to the twilight world of the vampire and the werewolf.

44
Letter from Oscar Wilde to Rex LaSalle, care of 17 Wardour Street, Soho, delivered by messenger

16 Tite Street, Chelsea

Monday morning

My dear Rex,

Where are you? How are you? What has happened to you, my precious, gilt and graceful boy? Why did you not say
au revoir
among the graves? Out of a complex night came a simple dawn – but you were nowhere to be seen.

Are you alone in your room? Or have you found some other Eden? Where are you hiding? What are you hiding? And why? I hope that you will want to share some of your many secrets with your admiring and devoted friend,
Oscar Wilde

This evening I am dining with Arthur Conan Doyle at the Langham Hotel. If you come by at ten o’clock you will find us in the Palm Court. Arthur will retire at eleven with a glass of warm milk and the collected works of Sir Walter Scott. You and I may then take a moonlit stroll and reflect upon the truth that every impulse we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Tonight, together, let us hear the chimes at midnight.

45
Notes made by Arthur Conan Doyle following his visit to the Charcot Clinic at Muswell Manor, Monday, 17 March 1890

The Charcot Clinic is set in the east wing of a large country house on top of Muswell Hill. The house itself – Muswell Manor – is dark, covered in vines and cloistered by lime trees, but from the carriage drive leading to it there are fine views south towards the City of London. (There was a mist this morning, but even so I could see the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral five miles away.)

Muswell Hill is an old English village fast becoming a suburb of the metropolis. Its name derives from the natural spring – the ‘mossy well’ – that has its source in the grounds of Muswell Manor and produces a pure drinking water famed for its curative powers.

Since medieval times Muswell Hill has been a place of pilgrimage for the sick in search of a miracle. Since the end of the last century, Muswell Manor has been a lunatic asylum. Since December of last year, the asylum has been under the direction of Lord Yarborough, MD, FRS.

My visit today – postponed from last Friday – was at the personal invitation of Lord Yarborough. He has approached a number of
general practitioners like me – doctors who are members of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association study group on hysteria. He has invited us to come to Muswell Manor, individually or in small groups, to visit the Charcot Clinic where he and his colleagues are exploring the pathology of hysteria. They are doing so under the guidance – and using the techniques – of the great Jean-Martin Charcot, professor of diseases of the nervous system at the Paris Medical Faculty and, indisputably, the leading neurologist of our time.

In his letter of invitation, Lord Yarborough expressed the certainty that I would learn something of value from my visit and the hope that it would lead to me recommending patients to him. He was candid: ‘The clinic needs patients, both for their benefit and to assist us in our research.’

Foolishly, because I left my hotel in haste this morning, I omitted to take Lord Yarborough’s letter with me to Muswell Hill. For this reason, on arrival I presented myself at the main entrance to Muswell Manor instead of the entrance to the east wing. When I rang the bell, I heard no sound, but the front door swung open almost at once. An old man – smiling, toothless, hairless, wearing nothing but a nightshirt, flimsy and soiled – beckoned me across the threshold and, in a thin, piping voice, begged to know my business. I explained that I had an appointment with Lord Yarborough. Solemnly, the old man told me that Lord Yarborough was not available, but that the Duke of Wellington would see me right away.

At once I realised my mistake, but it was too late. I was already surrounded by a dozen lunatics – mad men and women, bawling, screeching, laughing, pulling at my person, tearing at my clothes, demanding my attention and my sympathy. For minutes on end (or so it seemed) I stood locked in their midst, pleading with them, unable to free myself from their ghastly grip. Eventually, rescuers – in the unlikely form of two nuns, nursing sisters armed with heavy kitchen brooms – appeared from nowhere and, with alarming ferocity, set about my captors with their broomsticks, beating the hapless creatures into submission.

As my insane assailants limped and sloped away, some whimpering, some snarling angrily, some in tears, one of the nuns followed after them, shooing them towards the corridor that led out of the hallway, like a farmer’s wife bustling after errant geese and chickens. The other nun, the older of the pair, stayed to reprimand me.

‘This is not the public entrance,’ she scolded.

‘This is for patients only. They should not be disturbed. Some of them are dangerous. Did you meet the Duke of Wellington?’

‘He is not the Duke of Wellington, surely?’

‘No, but he is the Earl of Yattenden – the son of the Marquess of Truro. And he is capable of murder. He may have killed his own mother, but it was never proved. That’s why he’s here – and not down the road.’

‘Down the road’ is the Colney Hatch asylum
where more than three thousand lunatics are housed under one roof at public expense. ‘Here’ is Muswell Manor, a privately owned, fee-paying institution, where fifty deranged gentlefolk live in comparative comfort.

‘Our patients are people of quality, all from good families – though we never see their families, of course. They are here because their families want nothing to do with them.’

When the nun spoke, I recognised her accent at once. She is an Aberdonian. When I introduced myself, she recognised my name, being herself an admirer of Sherlock Holmes.

The scolding done and familiarity established, Sister Agnes escorted me through the house to the east wing. Despite her forbidding features – an aquiline nose, a narrow mouth, a wart upon her chin – and her prowess with the broomstick, I took her to be a kindly woman. She told me something of the history of Muswell Manor and spoke with feeling of the pathetic creatures in her charge.

‘We cannot cure them. We pray for them – and feed them and water them, and do our best to keep them clean and out of harm’s way. They are not here to regain their wits. We have no treatment to offer them. They are here to live out their days. That’s all. Some of them have been living here for more than sixty years.’

Most of the patients, as we passed by them, shied away from us, eyes cast down, cowering, saying nothing. Most wore nightshirts either covered with outdoor coats or dressing gowns.

There was but one exception that I saw. Outside the door that connected the main house with the east wing, sitting upright upon a hard-backed chair, gazing straight towards us, was a handsome woman of about fifty. Her hair was grey, her face was pale, but her dark-brown eyes burned fiercely. Though it was mid-morning she wore a full-length evening gown, of silk, plum-coloured with an edging of royal blue. As we came close to her, I noticed that the lace frills at her throat and wrists were worn and badly torn. She got to her feet and curtsied low before us.

‘I must see Lord Yarborough,’ she said.

‘You cannot, Lady M,’ said Sister Agnes. ‘You know that. Lord Yarborough will not see you.’

‘I must see him,’ repeated the lady. ‘I will see him. I will wait.’

She curtsied once more and resumed her seat. Her eyes never left us as Sister Agnes searched for her bundle of keys, found the one that she needed, unlocked the door to the east wing and escorted me through.

‘Lady M has been with us for twenty years,’ the nun explained, with a sigh, locking the door behind us. ‘Every day she expects to be released. It will never happen.’

‘And why will Lord Yarborough not see her?’ I asked.

‘Because my time is precious and there would be no point.’

Lord Yarborough’s voice rang out along the corridor.

‘Sister Agnes, kindly bring my guest this way.’

Lord Yarborough’s office door was open. The nun took me to it.

‘Thank you, Sister.’

The nun accepted her dismissal, bobbed a curtsy and went on her way.

‘Welcome, Dr Doyle,’ said Lord Yarborough affably. ‘I am grateful to you for coming. You are our only visitor today.’

He did not rise from his desk, nor did he shake my hand. He simply indicated that I should take the seat facing him. I did so.

‘I own the whole of Muswell Manor,’ he went on at once, ‘but I do not concern myself with the asylum. The patients there are beyond recall. I can do nothing for them. The asylum is Sister Agnes’s domain. My work is all here in the clinic. This is what I want you to see.’

For almost an hour I sat listening to Lord Yarborough. He spoke swiftly, fluently, with passion and without pause. He is, he explained, both a physician and a psychiatrist, but, above all, he sees himself as a disciple of Jean-Martin Charcot.

‘Of all men, he is the one I most admire. I was born to position and privilege. Charcot was not.’

He told me Charcot’s story: how he had been born in Paris in 1825, the son of a wagon-maker; how all that he had achieved had been through his own endeavours; how, as a young man, he had secured himself a position at the notorious, sprawling Salpêtrière Hospital on the outskirts of
Paris, ‘the Versailles of pain’, ‘the great emporium of human misery’, where the lame and the halt, the lunatic and the senile, the demented and the depraved provided what Charcot called ‘
une sorte de musée pathologique vivant
’ – a kind of living pathological museum.