The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (32 page)

Charles swiveled round in
agony. "On my most sacred honor, nothing improper has passed between us.
You must believe that."

"I believe you. But let me
put you through the old catechism. Do you wish to hear her? Do you wish
to see her? Do you wish to touch her?"

Charles turned away again
and sank into the chair, his face in his hands. It was no answer, yet it
said everything. After a moment, he raised his face and stared into the
fire.

"Oh my dear Grogan, if you
knew the mess my life was in ... the waste of it ... the uselessness of
it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything. It seems
only a few months ago that I was twenty-one--full of hopes...all disappointed.
And now to get entangled in this miserable business..."

Grogan moved beside him and
gripped his shoulder. "You are not the first man to doubt his choice of
bride." "She understands so little of what I really am." "She is--what?--a
dozen years younger than yourself? And she has known you not six months.
How could she understand you as yet? She is hardly out of the schoolroom."

Charles nodded gloomily.
He could not tell the doctor his real conviction about Ernestina: that
she would never understand him. He felt fatally disabused of his own intelligence.
It had let him down in his choice of a life partner; for like so many Victorian,
and perhaps more recent, men Charles was to live all his life under the
influence of the ideal. There are some men who are consoled by the idea
that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are
haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive. Charles now saw
only too well which category he belonged to. He murmured, "It is not her
fault. It cannot be."

"I should think not. A pretty
young innocent girl like that."

"I shall honor my vows to
her."

"Of course."

A silence.

"Tell me what to do."

"First tell me your real
sentiments as regards the other."

Charles looked up in despair;
then down to the fire, and tried at last to tell the truth.

"I cannot say, Grogan. In
all that relates to her, I am an enigma to myself. I do not love her. How
could I? A woman so compromised, a woman you tell me is mentally diseased.
But ... it is as if ... I feel like a man possessed against his will--against
all that is better in his character. Even now her face rises before me,
denying all you say. There is something in her. A knowledge, an apprehension
of nobler things than are compatible with either evil or madness. Beneath
the dross ... I cannot explain."

"I did not lay evil at her
door. But despair."

No sound, but a floorboard
or two that creaked as the doctor paced. At last Charles spoke again. "What
do you advise?"

"That you leave matters entirely
in my hands."

"You will go to see her?"

"I shall put on my walking
boots. I shall tell her you have been unexpectedly called away. And you
must go away, Smithson."

"It so happens I have urgent
business in London."

"So much the better. And
I suggest that before you go you lay the whole matter before Miss Freeman."

"I had already decided upon
that." Charles got to his feet. But still that face rose before him. "And
she--what will you do?"

"Much depends upon her state
of mind. It may well be that all that keeps her sane at the present juncture
is her belief that you feel sympathy--perhaps something sweeter-- for her.
The shock of your not appearing may, I fear, produce a graver melancholia.
I am afraid we must anticipate that." Charles looked down. "You are not
to blame that upon yourself. If it had not been you, it would have been
some other. In a way, such a state of affairs will make things easier.
I shall know what course to take."

Charles stared at the carpet.
"An asylum."

"That colleague I mentioned--he
shares my views on the treatment of such cases. We shall do our best. You
would be prepared for a certain amount of expense?"

"Anything to be rid of her--without
harm to her."

"I know a private asylum
in Exeter. My friend Spencer has patients there. It is conducted in an
intelligent and enlightened manner. I should not recommend a public institution
at this stage."

"Heaven forbid. I have heard
terrible accounts of them."

"Rest assured. This place
is a model of its kind."

"We are not talking of committal?"

For there had arisen in Charles's
mind a little ghost of treachery: to discuss her so clinically, to think
of her locked in some small room...

"Not at all. We are talking
of a place where her spiritual wounds can heal, where she will be kindly
treated, kept occupied--and will have the benefit of Spencer's excellent
experience and care. He has had similar cases. He knows what to do."

Charles hesitated, then stood
and held out his hand. In his present state he needed orders and prescriptions,
and as soon as he had them, he felt better.

"I feel you have saved my
life."

"Nonsense, my dear fellow."

"No, it is not nonsense.
I shall be in debt to you for the rest of my days."

"Then let me inscribe the
name of your bride on the bill of credit."

"I shall honor the debt."

"And give the charming creature
time. The best wines take the longest to mature, do they not?"

"I fear that in my own case
the same is true of a very inferior vintage."

"Bah. Poppycock." The doctor
clapped him on the shoulder. "And by the bye, I think you read French?"

Charles gave a surprised
assent. Grogan sought through his shelves, found a book, and then marked
a passage in it with a pencil before passing it to his guest.

"You need not read the whole
trial. But I should like you to read this medical evidence that was brought
by the defense."

Charles stared at the volume.
"A purge?"

The little doctor had a gnomic
smile.

"Something of the kind."
 
 

Assumptions, hasty,
crude, and vain,
Full oft to use will Science
deign;
The corks the novice plies
today
The swimmer soon shall cast
away.
--
A. H. Clough, Poem (1840)

Again I spring to
make my choice;
Again in tones of ire
I hear a God's tremendous
voice--
"Be counsel'd, and retire!"
--
Matthew Arnold, "The Lake"
(1853)

Worse was to come. On the
night of September 24th, 1834, Marie's English governess, a Miss Allen,
was woken by her sixteen-year-old charge, who told in tears how La Ronciere,
in full uniform, had just forced his way through the window into her adjacent
bedroom, bolted the door, made obscene threats, struck her across the breasts
and bitten her hand, then forced her to raise her night-chemise and wounded
her in the upper thigh. He had then escaped by the way he had come.

The very next morning another
lieutenant supposedly favored by Marie de Morell received a highly insulting
letter, again apparently from La Ronciere. A duel was fought. La Ronciere
won, but the severely wounded adversary and his second refused to concede
the falsity of the poison-pen charge. They threatened La Ronciere that
his father would be told if he did not sign a confession of guilt; once
that was done, the matter would be buried. After a night of agonized indecision,
La Ronciere foolishly agreed to sign.

He then asked for leave and
went to Paris, in the belief that the affair would be hushed up. But signed
letters continued to appear in the Morells' house. Some claimed that Marie
was pregnant, others that her parents would soon both be murdered, and
so on. The Baron had had enough. La Ronciere was arrested. The number of
circumstances in the accused's favor was so large that we can hardly believe
today that he should have been brought to trial, let alone convicted. To
begin with, it was common knowledge in Saumur that Marie had been piqued
by La Ronciere's obvious admiration for her handsome mother, of whom the
daughter was extremely envious. Then the Morell mansion was surrounded
by sentries on the night of the attempted rape; not one had noticed anything
untoward, even though the bedroom concerned was on the top floor and reachable
only by a ladder it would have required at least three men to carry and
"mount"--therefore a ladder that would have left traces in the soft soil
beneath the window ... and the defense established that there had been
none. Furthermore, the glazier brought in to mend the pane broken by the
intruder testified that all the broken glass had fallen outside the house
and that it was in any case impossible to reach the window catch through
the small aperture made. Then the defense asked why during the assault
Marie had never once cried for help; why the light-sleeping Miss Allen
had not been woken by the scuffling; why she and Marie then went back to
sleep without waking Madame de Morell, who slept through the whole incident
on the floor below; why the thigh wound was not examined until months after
the incident (and was then pronounced to be a light scratch, now fully
healed); why Marie went to a ball only two evenings later and led a perfectly
normal life until the arrest was finally made--when she promptly had a
nervous breakdown (again, the defense showed that it was far from the first
in her young life); how the letters could still appear in the house, even
when the penniless La Ronciere was in jail awaiting trial; why any poison-pen
letter-writer in his senses should not only not disguise his writing (which
was easily copiable) but sign his name; why the letters showed an accuracy
of spelling and grammar (students of French will be pleased to know that
La Ronciere invariably forgot to make his past participles agree) conspicuously
absent from genuine correspondence produced for comparison; why twice he
even failed to spell his own name correctly; why the incriminating letters
appeared to be written on paper--the greatest contemporary authority witnessed
as much-- identical to a sheaf found in Marie's escritoire. Why and why
and why, in short. As a final doubt, the defense also pointed out that
a similar series of letters had been found previously in the Morells' Paris
house, and at a time when La Ronciere was on the other side of the world,
doing service in Cayenne.

But the ultimate injustice
at the trial (attended by Hugo, Balzac and George Sand among many other
celebrities) was the court's refusal to allow any cross-examination of
the prosecution's principal witness: Marie de Morell. She gave her evidence
in a cool and composed manner; but the president of the court, under the
cannon-muzzle eyes of the Baron and an imposing phalanx of distinguished
relations, decided that her "modesty" and her "weak nervous state" forbade
further interrogation.

La Ronciere was found guilty
and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. Almost every eminent jurist in
Europe protested, but in vain. We can see why he was condemned, or rather,
by what he was condemned: by social prestige, by the myth of the pure-minded
virgin, by psychological ignorance, by a society in full reaction from
the pernicious notions of freedom disseminated by the French Revolution.
But now let me translate the pages that the doctor had marked. They come
from the Observations Medico-psychologiques of a Dr. Karl Matthaei, a well-known
German physician of his time, written in support of an abortive appeal
against the La Ronciere verdict. Matthaei had already had the intelligence
to write down the dates on which the more obscene letters, culminating
in the attempted rape, had occurred. They fell into a clear monthly--or
menstrual-- pattern. After analyzing the evidence brought before the court,
the Herr Doktor proceeds, in a somewhat moralistic tone, to explain the
mental illness we today call hysteria--the assumption, that is, of symptoms
of disease or disability in order to gain the attention and sympathy of
others: a neurosis or psychosis almost invariably caused, as we now know,
by sexual repression.