MODERN GHOSTS

 11 cartes de visite based on characters from de Maupassant short stories

 “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”

Guy de Maupassant

 Guy de Maupassant’s grave at Montparnasse Cemetery is modest and surrounded by others of much the same dimensions, so even with a good map you have to search for it. Visitors have attached various mementoes including a small teddy bear and a china dove that look out of place on the tomb of someone whose most famous stories are about cruelty and madness. Across the road, Baudelaire’s grave is littered with whiskey bottles, beer cans and dead flowers, which seem more appropriate to the writer, even if Baudelaire wanted to be remembered as a great aesthete and art critic, not a laudanum addict.

Trying to find a dozen carte de visites in the collection that could resemble characters from Maupassant’s short stories turned out to be difficult, partly because the restrictions – French, between 1860 and 1890, and not used in a previous blog post – precluded some better examples. No one remotely matched Boule de Suif, “round as a barrel, fat as butter and with fingers tightly jointed like strings of small sausages (and with) two magnificent dark eyes shaded by thick black lashes”.  The woman above could pass for another passenger on the coach, Madame Loiseau; “tall, stout and determined looking, (with) a shrill voice and a brisk manner”, but then she could be any one of the stolid, middle class matrons who never suffered in his stories but observed the misery inflicted on others with smug indifference. The portrait incidentally is from Bayard and Berthall. Hippolyte Bayard was one of the pioneers of photography, famous for his self portrait as a drowned man, who went on to a distinguished career in photography and has a chain of islands off Antarctica named after him.

A survey like this must include a Prussian officer since so many of Maupassant’s short stories were set during the Franco-Prussian War, and here is one, photographed by a French studio in Metz, a city close to Alsace that was captured by Prussia and not returned to France until 1918.  Part of the popularity of Maupassant’s short war stories was in his ability to show the French as either victims or perpetrators of atrocities with a directness that made their actions understandable. The problem is that Maupassant’s Prussians tend to be of two types, the simple minded conscript or the heartless boor and this man appears to be neither. He could be one of the soldiers billeted with Mother Savage, who “behaved as good sons would towards their mother”, but that would assume he escaped the revenge the mother extracted from the soldiers for her son’s death in another theatre of the war. 

  

 And here could well be Mother Savage’s son, or one of the many others who paid the price for a French officer’s stupidity or a Prussian’s military obligations. A popular theory after the war was that France’s defeat was brought about by a crisis in masculinity; a nation of once strapping men had become weak and listless, the result of growing up in cities that encouraged pleasure and dissolution. However strongly Maupassant subscribed to the idea, most of his young men are not fit or ready for war. Lacking the brute pragmatism of the Prussians they often bring on their own deaths by showing an unnecessary moment of compassion. The carte has no photographer’s stamp but a look at the records shows that A. Jorda operated from 10 Rue Villedo during the 1860s.

“Oh! Yes; you understand me well enough. It is now three months since I had my last child, and as I am still very beautiful, and as, in spite of all your efforts you cannot spoil my figure, as you just now perceived, when you saw me on the doorstep, you think it is time that I should think of having another child.” In contests involving romantic love women always succeed in making the men look like fools. In ‘Useless Beauty’ the countess schemes against her husband by insinuating one of their many children is not his, then watches him stew as he tries to work out which one. Though the woman in this portrait is not a countess, she matches Maupassant’s description in every other way. Look at the child. The photographer has arranged a distraction off camera in order to keep her (or it could be him) still. Back then a distraction could involve anything from a bird on a stick – “watch the birdie” – to firing a pistol. Some studios were also known to dose children up with opium, which also worked.

 I was born with all the instincts and senses of primitive man but these have been tempered with time by both the reasoning and the sensibilities of his civilized successor. I am passionately fond of hunting yet a bleeding animal, a bird with blood on its wings, or even the sight of blood on my own hands often makes me feel faint. This is from the opening paragraphs to ‘Love; three pages from the diary of a hunting man’ and it could describe most men from Maupassant’s social circle, they being an urbane bunch who boasted of their masculine prowess yet often came up short when it was put to the test. Though he was taken under the wing by Flaubert, Maupassant didn’t think much of the famous author’s friends, particularly the Goncourt brothers who struck him as vain and pretentious. Not to label the subject of this portrait by Lefevre as such but he does come across as a typical Parisian, chasing pleasure before duty and, in Maupassant’s view, sure to have one of life’s cruel lessons inflicted on him …

 … Like the central character in ‘Tombstones’: One of the most lively of them was Joseph de Bardon, a bachelor living the Parisian life in its fullest and most whimsical manner. He was not a debauche nor depraved, but a singular, happy fellow, still young, for he was scarcely forty. A man of the world in its widest and best sense, gifted with a brilliant, but not profound, mind, with much varied knowledge, but no true erudition, ready comprehension without true understanding, he drew from his observations, his adventures, from everything he saw, met with and found, anecdotes at once comical and philosophical, and made humorous remarks that gave him a great reputation for cleverness in society.

Bardon thinks he is on to a good thing when he meets a young woman wracked with grief in Montmartre Cemetery. By the story’s end he is more mystified by human behaviour than a self-proclaimed man of the world ought to be.

 Maître Hauchecome, economical like a true Norman, thought that everything useful ought to be picked up, and he bent painfully, for he suffered from rheumatism. He took the bit of thin cord from the ground and began to roll it carefully when he noticed Maître Malandain, the harness maker, on the threshold of his door, looking at him. They had heretofore had business together on the subject of a halter, and they were on bad terms, both being good haters.

This from ‘A Piece of String’, one of hundreds of stories Maupassant wrote about the peasants of Normandy. He is mostly unsparing. They are possessed of a stupid cunning and utter lack of curiosity and if they get what they want it is often through pig-headedness or sheer chance. What’s more, like the above paragraph suggests, they can be consumed by a rivalry that has no known or a completely trivial source. This portrait is by Claudius Couton, a Nice photographer better known for his work in Algeria. He was working there when Maupassant toured through the country though the chances they met are slim. In the 1870s Algeria was full of Frenchmen seeking artistic inspiration. Most of them came back with something, usually the pox.

And here is a lumber merchant or some other business operator from Normandy. Note how he looks well dressed though could hardly be described as having the sophisticated style expected of a Parisian. Maupassant came from a well off Norman family and he is more sympathetic to men like the one above than to any other from the region. They are inevitably sensible, practical and above the petty demands and grievances of the peasants. In a typical story, a man like ours above will sit at a bar and recount some tale from the district that has a meaning he doesn’t quite grasp.

What, you might ask, is a nun doing here? Well, apart from it being an uncommonly good portrait from the era, we can talk about the clergy because Maupassant scarcely does. Given the authority the Church still held over France, especially in the provinces, you’d think a considered atheist like Maupassant would be ready to expose its hypocrisy and dishonesty but then even his supernatural stories are set in the real world. God and religion have no place there, not even as enemies. His parents divorced when he was young and he was sent to a seminary, a grooming yard for the priesthood but had himself expelled within a few months, indicating his lack of belief was already established. On Good Friday the critic Sainte-Beuve and the illegitimate son of Napoleon III would get drunk and throw sausages at a crucifix yet it is what Maupassant didn’t say that marked him as subversive.

It is usual to associate Maupassant’s tales of madness with his decline into insanity brought on by syphilis but he was writing stories about the profoundly psychologically traumatised long before he knew he was afflicted. Madness was a popular image in French literature, thanks partly to Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, whose public lectures at Salpêtrière Hospital Maupassant and most of the Paris literati attended every Tuesday. Charcot’s most significant breakthroughs in the study of hysteria were in linking it to a trauma – though he resisted the obvious association with sexual trauma such as incest, leaving that to his student, Freud – and in declaring that men too suffered from it. The portrait above was taken at an unidentified French hospital in the 1880s. She has been diagnosed with hysteria.

Maupassant’s most famous story is ‘the Horla: Modern Ghosts’, which like earlier stories such as ‘Who Knows?’ linked the supernatural to paranoia and psychosis rather than the paranormal. The portrait above comes from the same hospital as the previous image. Though he is dishevelled his mental state isn’t immediately apparent. Neurology was still an uncertain science and a paranoid could be entering the tertiary stage of syphilis, suffering trauma as the result of war experiences or injury, be homeless or he could be an agitator the police or other authorities arranged to have locked up. In his last years Maupassant was severely afflicted, attempted suicide several times and spent his last months in the psychiatric hospital run by Esprit Blanche where the poet Nerval and composer Gounod were also treated.

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DE MAUPASSANT

TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS

 Portraits of psychiatric patients C1880s

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat. “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll; Alice in Wonderland

“The photographer catches in a moment the permanent cloud or the passing storm or sunshine of the soul and thus enables the metaphysician to witness and trace out the connection between the visible and the invisible in one important branch of his studies into the philosophy of the human mind.”

Hugh Welch Diamond

When Hugh Welch Diamond photographed psychiatric patients at Surrey County Hospital in the 1850s, he believed the camera was a new technology that could record things beyond human perception. In one way he was right; photographs could capture objects invisible to the naked eye. He was mistaken in believing that abstract ideas would freely offer themselves to the photographer. A photograph of a psychiatric patient was not a photograph of their illness.

The mistake wasn’t his alone. At Salpêtriére hospital outside of Paris, doctors and photographers including Guillaume Duchenne, Paul Régnard and Désiré-Magloire Bourneville began photographing psychiatric patients with much the same idea in mind. Duchenne took a series of photographs of a Parisian shoemaker suffering from Bell’s palsy. In order to record emotions Duchenne attached electrodes to various parts of the patient’s face to trigger muscular responses. The shoemaker’s subjection to science wasn’t entirely in vain. Duchenne was able to determine that emotional displays activated specific muscles, if a person smiled without using particular muscles that smile was either false or it could indicate a neurological disorder.

Régnard and Bourneville were more interested in documenting hysteria. The chief physician at Salpêtriére, Jean Martin Charcot, had instituted one reform and made two discoveries that revolutionized treatment of hysteria. The reform was to turn the hospital from a prison into a place for proper medical treatment. The old idea that people could be gathered up and dumped in a place out of sight, out of mind, was jettisoned. Salpêtriére would have gardens, stores and workplaces for the patients. Some commentators would describe the hospital during Charcot’s tenure as a city unto itself and by the 1880s it was appearing on tourist itineraries. The discoveries were first, that hysteria could be traced back to a trauma and was not therefore a physical illness of the womb or contagious as had earlier been believed. The second was that it wasn’t specific to women. Men could also be afflicted.

The work that Régnard and Bourneville undertook to document hysterics was collected in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtriére, the first volume coming out in 1876. It is a dubious record. It was later revealed that one patient, ‘Augustine’, actively played with the photographers and assuming poses for the camera. Actually, that should have exploded another myth, being that during the third stage of a hysterical attack, the ‘attitude passionelle’, a patient was supposedly unconscious of her surroundings. ‘Augustine’ evidently wasn’t.

In 1882 Albert Londe arrived at the hospital to begin working as a chemist. His work marks a new stage in the relationship between photography and psychiatry. Londe wasn’t interested in ideas that the camera could somehow penetrate the mind of the patient. He was more interested in the physical manifestations. By now Charcot had realized that hysteria could display itself in a variety of ways, that not everybody underwent five stages, and that some might be attacked by uncontrollable spasms while others remained catatonic. Londe’s task was to assemble the variety of these manifestations on the possible theory they could be traced back to specific neurological dysfunctions. In order to document them properly, Londe needed to record them using chronophotography, that is, in sequences of time so that the ways that patients twitched and convulsed could be compared against each other.

In a sense Londe’s work was also a failure; the catalogue would reveal nothing from which a solid medical diagnosis could be made. Still, it represented a more clinical approach to photography and the acknowledgement that the camera was limited in its applications. The recording of movement would become important in diagnosis if only to document the severity of attacks.

The photographs in this post’s gallery are a selection from 42 bought in an antique store in Istanbul. (The proprietor did not realize their significance and for once One Man’s Treasure came out the better.) They are in the CDV format. Each carte has a description of the illness and some have the patient’s name on the back. The illnesses are written in French, the custom of the time, though the names are German. Each portrait has a pinhole in the top left, suggesting they were affixed to documents or possibly to a wire loop for quick reference. They are undated though most likely taken in the mid to late 1880s. There are three basic styles; vignettes, which may be the earliest, full length portraits on albumen paper and what may be early gelatine prints on yellow card.

These portraits make no attempt to analyze the psychiatric condition. Rather, they are mug shots, used to identify the patient for the hospital records. Not every patient’s illness is apparent; without the description we could be forgiven for thinking some are regular studio portraits. This suggests the hospital may have recognized that the concept a camera was a metaphysical tool was wrong. Alternatively it did employ photography as such but at a different time. Whatever the case, the images still provide a window into the mind of a psychiatric patient in the late 19^th century. Most of these people are visibly ill. They are also, clearly, incapable of looking after themselves. Their smiles shouldn’t be seen as indications of happiness but dislocation. A number suffer from ‘dementia paralytica’, a euphemism for tertiary syphilis (also known as ‘general paralysis’). Idiocy is probably senility and melancholia, depression.

In the two decades immediately before these photographs were taken, psychiatrists, or as they were usually known, neurologists or alienists, had advanced knowledge of mental illness, somewhat. Apart from Charcot’s work, the classification of illnesses had become more refined so that schizophrenics were distinguished from epileptics or hysterics. Around the same time Freud was a student at Salpêtriére and developing his ideas on hysteria. They come from a period then when ideas about psychiatry and insanity were being revised. More emphasis was being given to locating the source of the illness from which, therefore, a cure might be effected.

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TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS