Don’t look now, but an unusual young woman and her elderly companion are sitting down behind us. Every Thursday afternoon they leave the Casino and come here to the caf terrace of the Hotel de Paris, always choosing the same two tables near the magazine kiosk. If you lean forward you can see the girl in the restaurant mirror, the tall and elegant one with the too-level gaze and that characteristic walk of rich young women who have been brought up by nuns.
The man is behind her, the seedy-looking fellow with the oncehandsome face, at least twenty years older, though you probably think thirty. He wears the same expensive but ill-fitting grey suit and silver tie, as if he has just been let out of some institution to attend a wedding. His eyes follow the secretaries returning from their lunches, plainly dreaming of escape. Observing his sad gaze, one not without a certain dignity, I can only conclude that Monte Carlo is a special kind of prison.
You’ve seen them now? Then you will agree it’s hard to believe that these two are married, and have even achieved a stable union, though of a special kind, and governed by a set of complex rituals. Once a week she drives him from Vence to Monte Carlo in their limousine, that gold-tinted Cadillac parked across the square. After half an hour they emerge from the Casino, when he has played away at the roulette wheels the few francs he has been given. From the kiosk of this caf terrace she buys him the same cheap magazine, one of those dreadful concierge rags about servant girls and their Prince Charmings, and then sips at her citron press as they sit at separate tables. Meanwhile he devours the magazine like a child. Her cool manner is the epitome of a serene self-assurance, of the most robust mental health.
Yet only five years ago, as the physician in charge of her case, I saw her in a very different light. Indeed, it’s almost inconceivable that this should be the same young woman whom I first came across at the Hospice of Our Lady of Lourdes, in a state of utter mental degeneration. That I was able to cure her after so many others had failed I put down to an extraordinary piece of psychiatric detection, of a kind that I usually despise. Unhappily, however, that success was bought at a price, paid a hundred times over by the sad old man, barely past his forty-fifth year, who drools over his trashy magazine a few tables behind us.
Before they leave, let me tell you about the case..
By chance, it was only the illness of a colleague that brought me into contact with Christina Brossard. After ten years of practice in Monaco as a successful dermatologist I had taken up a part-time consultancy at the American Clinic in Nice. While looking through the out-patients’ roster of an indisposed colleague I was told by his secretary that a 17-year-old patient, one Mlle Brossard, had not arrived for her appointment. At that moment one of the nursing sisters at the Our Lady of Lourdes Hospice at Vence — where the girl had been under care for three years telephoned to cancel the consultation.
‘The Mother Superior asks me to apologize to Prof. Derain but the child is simply too distraught again.’
I thought nothing of it at the time, but for some reason—perhaps the girl’s name, or the nun’s use of ‘again’ — I asked for the clinical notes. I noticed that this was the third appointment to be cancelled during the previous year. An orphan, Christina Brossard had been admitted to the Hospice at the age of fourteen after the suicide of her father, who had been her only guardian since the death of her mother in an air-crash.
At this point I remembered the entire tragedy. A former mayor of Lyon, Gaston Brossard was a highly successful building contractor and intimate of President Pompidou’s, a millionaire many times over. At the peak of his success this 55-year-old man had married for the third time. For his young bride, a beautiful ex-television actress in her early twenties, he had built a sumptuous mansion above Vence. Sadly, however, only two years after Christina’s birth the young mother had died when the company aircraft taking her to join her husband in Paris had crashed in the Alpes Maritimes. Heart-broken, Gaston Brossard then devoted the remaining years of his life to the care of his infant daughter. All had gone well, but twelve years later, for no apparent reason, the old millionaire shot himself in his bedroom.
The effects on the daughter were immediate and disastrous — complete nervous collapse, catatonic withdrawal and a slow but painful recovery in the nearby Hospice of Our Lady of Lourdes, which Gaston Brossard had generously endowed in memory of his young wife. The few clinical notes, jotted down by a junior colleague of Derain’s who had conscientiously made the journey to Vence, described a recurrent dermatitis, complicated by chronic anaemia and anorexia.
Sitting in my comfortable office, beyond a waiting room filled with wealthy middle-aged patients, I found myself thinking of this 17-year-old orphan lost high in the mountains above Nice. Perhaps my anti-clerical upbringing my father had been a left-wing newspaper cartoonist, my mother a crusading magistrate and early feminist — made me suspicious of the Hospice of Our Lady of Lourdes. The very name suggested a sinister combination of faith- healing and religious charlatanry, almost expressly designed to take advantage of a mentally unbalanced heiress. Lax executors and unconcerned guardians would leave the child ripe for exploitation, while her carefully preserved illness would guarantee the continued flow of whatever funds had been earmarked for the Hospice in Gaston Brossard’s will. As I well knew, dermatitis, anorexia and anaemia were all too often convenient descriptions for a lack of hygiene, malnutrition and neglect.
The following weekend, as I set off for Vence in my car — Prof. Derain had suffered a mild heart attack and would be absent for a month — I visualized this wounded child imprisoned above these brilliant hills by illiterate and scheming nuns who had deliberately starved the pining girl while crossing their palms with the dead man’s gold dedicated to the memory of the child’s mother.
Of course, as I soon discovered, I was totally in error. The Hospice of Our Lady of Lourdes turned out to be a brand-new, purpose-built sanatorium with well-lit rooms, sunny grounds and a self-evident air of up-to-date medical practice and devotion to the well-being of the patients, many of whom I could see sitting out on the spacious lawns, talking to their friends and relatives.
The Mother Superior herself, like all her colleagues, was an educated and intelligent woman with a strong, open face and sympathetic manner, and hands — as I always immediately notice — that were not averse to hard work.
‘It’s good of you to come, Dr Charcot. We’ve all been worried about Christina for some time. Without any disrespect to our own physicians, it’s occurred to me more than once that a different approach may be called for.’
‘Presumably, you’re referring to chemotherapy,’ I suggested. ‘Or a course of radiation treatment? One of the few Betatrons in Europe is about to be installed at the Clinic.’
‘Not exactly…’ The Mother Superior walked pensively around her desk, as if already reconsidering the usefulness of my visit. ‘I was thinking of a less physical approach, Dr Charcot, one concerned to lay the ghosts of the child’s spirit as well as those of her body. But you must see her for yourself.’
It was now my turn to be sceptical. Since my earliest days as a medical student I had been hostile to all the claims made by psychotherapy, the happy hunting ground of pseudo-scientific cranks of an especially dangerous kind.
Leaving the Hospice, we drove up into the mountains towards the Brossard mansion, where the young woman was allowed to spend a few hours each day.
‘She’s extremely active, and tends to unsettle the other patients,’ the Mother Superior explained as we turned into the long drive of the mansion, whose Palladian faade presided over a now silent fountain terrace. ‘She seems happier here, among the memories of her father and mother.’
We were let into the imposing hall by one of the two young nuns who accompanied the orphaned heiress on these outings. As she and the A HOST OF FURIOUS FANCIES Mother Superior discussed a patient to be released that afternoon I strolled across the hail and gazed up at the magnificent tapestries that hung from the marbled walls. Above the semi-circular flights of the divided staircase was a huge Venetian clock with ornate hands and numerals like strange weapons, guardians of a fugitive time.
Beyond the shuttered library a colonnaded doorway led to the dining room. Dustcovers shrouded the chairs and table, and by the fireplace the second of the nuns supervised a servant-girl who was cleaning out the grate. A visiting caretaker or auctioneer had recently lit a small fire of deeds and catalogues. The girl, wearing an old- fashioned leather apron, worked hard on her hands and knees, meticulously sweeping up the cinders before scrubbing the stained tiles.
‘Dr Charcot…’ The Mother Superior beckoned me into the dining room. I followed her past the shrouded furniture to the fireplace.
‘Sister Julia, I see we’re very busy again. Dr Charcot, I’m sure you’ll be pleased by the sight of such industry.’
