Sport 42: 2014
Stephanie de Montalk — The ‘Vendor of Happiness’ — Alphonse Daudet (1840 –1897)
Stephanie de Montalk
The ‘Vendor of Happiness’
Alphonse Daudet (1840 –1897)
As the notion that I should write an illness narrative grew, I went in search of writers who, ‘within the narrow bed of [their] flesh’, had found ways of speaking about pain. I wanted to delve into their daily lives and pertinent language: to hear about their challenges and interpretations of pain unblemished by societal niceties, to feel them walk off the page and into the room. ‘As controversial as any evidence of shaping may be in a trauma text—and what text is not shaped?— part of what we must call healing lies in the assertion of creativity,’ says Leigh Gilmore in The Limits of Autobiography (2001), considering the ‘ability to write beyond the silencing meted out by trauma’.
I booked a flight to Paris to interview novelist, playwright and memoirist, Alphonse Daudet. Paris—La Belle Époque, the mystery of the Symbolists, the artifice of Decadents, the fleeting detail of Impressionism.
*
The interview took place on the morning of November 1897, in Daudet’s first-floor apartment at 41 rue de l’Université on the left bank of the Seine. The family had shifted to the address only a few weeks previously in order to spare Daudet the climb to their fifth- floor rooms at 31 rue de Bellechasse—the home, in the same quarter, to which Madame Daudet would return to live after his death. In particular, I wanted to ask Daudet about his posthumously published notes, La Doulou (Provencal for douleur, pain), described by his fellow writer and friend, Jules Hoche, as a ‘balance sheet of [Daudet’s] daily misery’.
I arrived time-lagged and, it is fair to say, nervous, carrying a page 24 polished paua shell in a box (with a leaflet showing the sea snail’s point of collection on the New Zealand coastline). I was prepared for postponement. Daudet was un homme fatigué who directed his life carefully, day to day. For the past fourteen years, he had suffered from the progressive locomotor ataxia and severe nerve pain of tabes dorsalis—the phase of tertiary syphilis that destroys the dorsal columns of the spinal cord. Nonetheless, as an article in The New York Times had reported following the launch, in May, of La Fedor, his latest novel, ‘his genius triumphs over the excruciating nervous rheumatism which has crippled his lower limbs and even the opiates to which he has been obliged to have continuous recourse’.
André Ebner, Daudet’s secretary and friend, met me at the door and showed me to the Writing Room. He declared that the author had been at his desk dictating correspondence since eight and was in sound spirits awaiting my visit. ‘You’ll find he’s part ebbing strength and part prodigious energy,’ said Monsieur Ebner. ‘As his body fails, all his efforts are concentrated on preserving his intellect. To that end, and to discourage brooding, he works, works, works.’ Ebner knocked on a closed door. ‘But we cannot discount the force of will and support of morphine with which he also opposes his suffering.’ He glanced at the unwrapped box. ‘I see you’ve brought him a shell.’ Daudet was sitting at his table in the light of a lamp with a stamped paper shade. ‘It was the hour of intimacies and exchange of confidences,’ he had written in the prologue to Les Femmes d’artistes (1889):
The lamp shone softly under its shade, confining its bright circle to that intimate conversation, leaving in shadow the capricious luxury of the vast walls covered with canvases, panoplies and hangings and ending at the very top in windows, through which the dark blue of the sky entered freely.
As I entered, Ebner at my elbow, Daudet turned, fixed his monocle and, grasping first the arm of the chair then the edge of the table, slowly stood. He wore an unbuttoned jacket of black velvet over a charcoal waistcoat and white shirt, and a floppy maroon bow tie which lifted the sombre apparel but accentuated the thinness of his page 25 chest and pallor of his face. He waved Ebner, who had moved forward to assist, aside, grasped his silver-tipped cane and walked forward, shakily but unaided, with the hesitant rolling gait typical of his ataxic condition. He was smaller and frailer than I had imagined, but an awareness of his own charm and once youthful capability was still apparent in his attentive gaze and lingering smile. I remembered Émile Zola’s description of him in Les Romanciers Naturalistes (1881) as a young man, as ‘handsome, subtly and nervously handsome, like an Arab horse, with an abundant mane’; and his own remark, made a decade ago when, fencing with the foil, he fell, that while his mind had kept ‘all the youth, vigour and drive’ of his best years, his body was ‘a wet rag’. I was also reminded that he was so short-sighted that he had once talked for fifteen minutes to a rug on a chair, believing it to be Edmond de Goncourt.
He greeted me warmly, in the French manner. Politely accepted the paua shell. Gestured to a sofa beneath the window suggesting the light would assist with note-taking. I said that, as I was unable to sit, I would stand against the wall. Concerned, he pressed me for details. I summarised my predicament (heavy fall, marble floor, damaged nerve). He shook his head. Murmured sympathetically. Insisted I recline on the méridienne. Observed that since sitting was almost as natural as walking, I must be greatly inconvenienced.
‘Even more natural than walking,’ I said, pointing out that babies sit before they walk.
‘Just so.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Do you attend the theatre and dine out? Ride in cabs? How do you write—do you employ a secretary? Nerve pain, you say? If Jean-Martin Charcot, my neurologist, were still alive I’d urge an appointment. His successor at the Sorbonne, Fulgence Raymond, might see you. Ebner will send a letter of introduction.’
Daudet’s eldest son, Léon, had written in Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir (1898), ‘My father’s welcome is always pleasant. His kindly air is in no sense a mask.’
The interview immediately focused on pain.
I had intended to open by reviewing, with Daudet, details of his life and writing career. He was born in Nîmes, son of a silk manufacturer page 26 who suffered financial ruin during the Depression following the Revolution of 1848. He had an unsettled childhood, and an adolescence and young adulthood marked, in the words of his brother Ernest, by ‘wretchedness, dangerous escapades and unwholesome distractions’. Despite his reputation as a sensualist with a propensity for affairs, he remained happily married and devoted to Julia Allard (author of Impressions de nature et d’art, 1879, L’Enfance d’une Parisienne, 1883), his intellectual and creative companion. The couple had two sons, Léon and Lucien, and a daughter, Edmée. As an author, he had produced poetry, novels, plays, musicals, memoirs, newspaper serials, chronicles, children’s stories—more than forty popular works that also appealed to a literary readership. Read widely in translation in England and America, he was favoured as a French Dickens (Daudet knew and admired Dickens but decried his influence), and as a Gallic Mark Twain ‘with a flavour of Cervantes’ (it’s said his larger than life Provençal character, Tartarin, of Tartarin de Tarascon (1872), and subsequent Tartarin novels, was inspired by Don Quixote). His first publications were a collection of poetry, Les Amoureuses (1858), and La Double Conversion (1861), a short story in verse. And his most lasting works were Le Petit Chose (1868), a partly autobiographical novel of which the first section is related to his own boyhood; Lettres de mon moulin (1869), evoking scenes of life in Provence; and Contes du Lundi (1873) and Contes et récits (1873), primarily patriotic tales related to his experiences during the Franco-Prussian War. He was especially remembered for his Tartarin series, and for Numa Roumestan (1881), which contrasts meridional and Parisian life. Although commonly associated with Naturalist Realism, his most memorable works are described as ‘delicate transpositions and subtle evocations of human suffering’.
I had also anticipated setting parameters regarding discussion of syphilis. This might include his infection, at age seventeen, by a lettrice de la cour (a woman employed by the court of Napoleon III to read aloud from recently published works); the dormancy of his disease (apart from episodic insomnia, mood changes, visual disturbances and pains thought to be ‘rheumatisms’) until the onset, at age 45, of full-blown tabes dorsalis, also known as neurosyphilis; his fear that the tabes would progress to paralysis and the dementia known page 27 as general paresis. I was anxious to ascertain the necessary level of discretion, for, despite the societal prevalence of syphilis, the disease was not named in La Doulou, or in any of Daudet’s writings, and his biographical profiles deferred to descriptive variations of a disabling and painful spinal condition. Of course, there would be no mention of his son Léon’s subsequent development of the disease.
But, as Daudet settled in his chair, the purposeful mood of the room changed. Heavy rain, threatening since dawn, started to fall. The light dropped, shadowing and relaxing his face. The windows became foggy. The coal dwindled to ash, its remnants glowing in the grate. And, as we conversed—Daudet taking time to fill his small pipe, stroke his beard and sift through his papers in order, I assumed, to facilitate my note-taking, or alert me to the weight of a phrase or a silence I was expected to consider—I became aware of a shift beyond the lamp with the stamped paper shade to the lightness of relief, birdsong, a sunny nook in the garden—to a place of the poppy, perhaps?
*
DE MONTALK
How should I address you—Alphonse? Daudet? Alphonse Daudet?
DAUDET
Please, call me The Vendor of Happiness—this is how I should like to be remembered.
DE MONTALK
Even though you’re in pain? Do you speak allegorically—how would someone who suffers sell happiness?
DAUDET
I intend no allegory. I refer to the happiness that arises from conforter in Old French: to solace, to help, to strengthen.
DE MONTALK
Rather than the luck, fortune or chance of hap in Middle English?
page 28DAUDET
Exactly.
DE MONTALK (after a pause)
Are you in the present or past? Here or there? Informal or formal?
DAUDET (amused)
I am wherever the past and the present meet, wherever there’s a garden or cagnard [wind shelter] and the unalloyed joy of baring one’s back to the sun. I travel imaginatively: as you can see, I’m limited by my illness. I stand at this window and roads appear to me, as escapes from my pain. I tread paths soft with simple herbs. I hear broom popping. I stroll into the distance. I listen and remember. On turnpikes, Léon calls, ‘Papa, Papa, watch out for the little stones!’
DE MONTALK
As a vendor of solace, how would you dispense your comforting wares?
DAUDET
I would reach out to everyone and gently gain their confidence. In the case of the sick, like an understanding physician I’d examine the psychological response, mark its outline as I might a wound on the skin and follow its fluctuations, all the while reassuring the suffering one with the passing parade of his contemporaries! This appeal to the ego is failsafe! Then, I would gradually produce a picture of a constrained but a nevertheless worthwhile future, in which the patient consoles and supports himself by comforting others. Placing my aims beyond myself in this way enables me to evade Fate to some extent.
DE MONTALK
Has pain been your Fate? You’ve said that in the first half of your life you knew misery, and in the second half pain. Which has predominated?
DAUDET
The pain of tabes dorsalis, certainly—the incessant physical agony.
page 29DE MONTALK
The fatigue, the weakness, the unsteady gait?
DAUDET
Those too—les souffrances.
DE MONTALK
The visceral symptoms, real and false?
DAUDET
Notably the misleading bladder tenderness, which was the beginning of the terminal phase.
DE MONTALK
A damaged nerve playing games?
DAUDET
An illness testing me, gathering strength, wearing me down.
DE MONTALK
Despite the offerings of prominent neurologists such as Jean-Martin Charcot and, from Harvard, Charles Brown-Sequard?
DAUDET
I can date each aspect of my pain’s progression—each ghastly surprise, each teasing remission.
DE MONTALK
I have read and re-read your pain notes, La Doulou.
DAUDET
But these are unpublished. They’re still in my drawer—in draft form! How can this be?
DE MONTALK
You are where the past and the present touch. I am between the present and the future. La Doulou was published by Madame Daudet in 1930, page 30 and in 1934 and 2002 appeared in separate English translations.
DAUDET (shifting in his chair)
Vraiment?
DE MONTALK
The first translation was made by Milton Garver, a professor of French at Yale. It’s entitled Suffering, and includes a commentary and notes by Monsieur Ebner.
DAUDET
The title’s appropriate, Ebner has seen to that. He—like his father, who was my first secretary—knows as well as anyone that when I say ‘I’m in pain,’ what I mean is ‘I’m suffering.’ What of his commentary?
DE MONTALK
He says that you contemplated your suffering with ‘lucid pity’.
DAUDET
If you can’t pity yourself, who can you pity?
DE MONTALK
And he says that this pity, by which I assume he includes empathy, was apparent in your dealings with other sufferers, and in your writing generally.
DAUDET
The second translation?
DE MONTALK
It was made by the English writer, Julian Barnes. It’s entitled In the Land of Pain: ‘The street carriages passing at a gallop. Lamalou in winter. In the land of pain.’ Barnes’ focus is pain, Garver’s is suffering. For instance, in Barnes’ book you’re a ‘band of pain’, while in Garver’s you’re ‘an orchestra of suffering’. Take, too, the opening dialogue. ‘What are you doing at the moment?’ someone asks you. ‘I’m in pain,’ says Barnes. ‘I am suffering,’ translates Garver.
page 31DAUDET
An unlikely social exchange.
DE MONTALK
Yes. I find that the borders quickly close at mention of untreatable pain.
DAUDET
Unless you’re speaking to someone with exactly the same problem. How you warm to such a person, how you insist he tells you every last detail!
DE MONTALK
The ‘pain diary’, as the small book’s been described, was edited for publication in France by your family. The original manuscript has disappeared. The work in English has been reviewed as ‘harrowing’; as ‘terrifying . . . dry, cold, helpless’; as rendering pain ‘in images that because of their modest particularity have rarely been equalled’. A friend in severe pain for a year turned away from it. I understood why. The grind of untreatable pain weakens one’s mind.
DAUDET
Mist against bricks.
DE MONTALK
It heightens awareness of fear.
DAUDET
I shake if I see my wife or one of the children lean out of a window.
DE MONTALK
It fosters acceptance of death.
DAUDET
To be free of pain . . .
page 32DE MONTALK
Nonetheless, I found your explicit descriptions of agony and desperation validating. Like supporting shadows, they lent me a strange comfort and strength. Were the notes compiled to console others as well as yourself?
DAUDET
When I learnt I’d have this condition forever, I started writing about it in order to counter the pain and temper my fear—to assuage ‘the fierce necessity of confessing myself’, as Léon used to say, by raising suffering to the light, and inspecting it. Not just my own plight, but also those of the sufferers I met at the spas. From an early age, it was my habit to record life, as I observed it, in notebooks. I’ve always believed that fiction should be the history of people who will never have any written account of their lives. More recently, I’ve stopped studying myself in order to give comfort to others.
Charcot encouraged me to sketch medically. He’d say of a patient, ‘Daudet, you should relate to this, I took some notes, I’ll give you the details later.’
DE MONTALK
Charcot of the barbaric Seyre’s Suspension treatment at Lamalou— the specialist who may have been able to help me!
DAUDET
He had faults. His death four years ago—a heart attack—was a great loss to neurology. But he was an unrivalled diagnostician. As for the beam and harness affair, it was designed to extend the spine and slacken the joints of ataxics.
DE MONTALK
An extreme form of ‘traction’.
DAUDET
He imported it from Russia. He didn’t operate the Lamalou apparatus himself. He didn’t consult at the spa, and I’m not aware that he ever went there. Keller, the hydrotherapist, carried out the treatments in page 33 the spa room—in the evening when no one was around.
DE MONTALK
Edmond de Goncourt witnessed the spectacle. He found the sight of patients hanging in the shadows beyond description.
DAUDET
I instantly remember the grimness. I hang for four minutes, the last two of which I’m supported only by my jaw—causing terrible pain in my teeth. In front of me the small dark Russian writhes and moans and lifts his arms in the air. As I’m lowered to the ground and relieved of the harness, pain explodes in my sinews and bones. I kneel on all fours waiting for the fire in my back and neck to subside and the melted marrow to congeal so I can be helped to my feet. I subjected myself to thirteen sessions, not stopping until I vomited blood—the intense stress, I imagined. The fruitless search for relief.
DE MONTALK
Including the disagreeable injections of guinea pig liquid?
DAUDET
Indeed, and infusions from bulls’ testicles when the guinea pig extract ran out. And the numerous trips to spas, which I visited to cure what were believed to be symptoms of rheumatism—even though, increasingly, I felt that something was forever faulty inside of me and I wouldn’t be able to take my body for granted any more. In 1885, when the pains became relentless and the unsteadiness and sense of myself in space worsened, I finally mustered the courage to consult Charcot—the ultimate classifier. I told him, ‘I’ve been saving you up for last.’ He gave me a direct diagnosis. Shocking, but necessary. One needs to know the worst. He prescribed gold chloride and advised the hot baths at Lamalou. For bouts of extreme pain there was morphine, which he recommended keeping below a certain dose and switching the times it was taken.
DE MONTALK
To prevent addiction.
page 34DAUDET (shrugs)
One succumbs.
DE MONTALK
There’s no option.
DAUDET
Are you a user?
DE MONTALK
No, the hallucinations are too disturbing. I take liquid oxycodone, synthesised from a different part of the poppy; it’s more potent than morphine and produces fewer side effects.
DAUDET
Hallucinations?
DE MONTALK
Some, but they’re less threatening. I avoid them by using the drug sparingly.
DAUDET
Tincture of opium?
DE MONTALK
Laudanum’s no longer available.
DAUDET
Curative spas?
DE MONTALK
Where I come from, convalescent resorts are few. Tell me about Lamalou.
DAUDET
From the time of Charcot’s diagnosis I went yearly. I immersed myself in the waters up to my neck reading my old friend Montaigne. He was page 35 sensitive to others’ physical suffering. I sat on a stone bench inside the bath in the opaque yellow water, reading and eavesdropping and remembering dramas and remarks for my notes.
At night, in the hotel, I read about Livingstone in Central Africa. The plodding monotony of his journey. The constant checking of air change and altitude. The grasslands and swamps. The preoccupations with cooking pots. The supplies, slow to arrive. All quietly providing mis en scènes, locations, through which my imagination could roam.
DE MONTALK
The travels of Sir Richard Burton work in the same way for me. I savour his tribulations as much his exotic locations. As Shakespeare says in Romeo and Juliet: ‘One pain is lessened by another’s anguish!’
DAUDET
Ah! And as they say in the Midi, the land of the sick: ‘The illness of a neighbour is always a comfort and may even be a cure!’
DE MONTALK
Lamalou-les-Bains—I hope to go there. I have a pamphlet. Healing waters first revealed during mining in the eleventh century. Muddy pools used by peasants in pain, their clothes impregnated by sulphur. These days, there’s a twenty-one-day thermal treatment for rheumatoid, neurologic and traumatic conditions for which application can be made for insurance support on the recommendation of a doctor.
DAUDET (between pauses)
Lamalou. The Institution. The hotel’s roughcast walls. Concerts and plays. The smell of wood fires. Potted lemon trees in the courtyard. Ataxics shuffling to and fro, performing their three-steps-and-a- hoppolka. Subjects to study. Patrons who share the same pain— no longer loners with odd illnesses, dismissed as hypochondriacs, considered sad but boring. Subjects also to avoid—in the dining room, gummy mouths ruminating, eyes glued to their plates, casting furious glances when their dishes are carried in late; and in the latrine, side by side, sharing their distressing evacuations, lit by the same gas jet ring . . .
page 36DE MONTALK
In La Doulou you describe pains in your legs, bladder and waist. Rats gnawing at your toes with razor teeth. A blade repeatedly thrust into your little finger. Intolerable flashes of pain in your heels and the soles of your feet. A pocket knife twisting beneath your big toenail. Muscles ground beneath the wheels of a wagon.
DAUDET
The worst was the pain I call the breastplate—a continuous, hideous spasm in my ribs, hoops of steel crushing my lower back. The terror. The panic.
DE MONTALK
It had you in its grip for months. You couldn’t undo the straps. You couldn’t breathe.
DAUDET
Tabetic pains vary in type and intensity.
DE MONTALK
They typify the caprice of nerve pain.
DAUDET
After one cruel night I wrote: ‘Crucifixion. That’s what it was . . . the torment of the Cross: violent wrenching of the hands, feet, knees; nerves stretched out and pulled to breaking point.’
DE MONTALK
The same night you imagined Christ and the two thieves conversing about pain.
DAUDET
Intimations of agony floated to and fro. I don’t recall what was said. I took a spoonful of bromide, salty, bitter. Sometimes I wonder if Flaubert struggled to find the right words because of the enormous quantity of bromide he ingested.
page 37DE MONTALK
Then you had several days of peace in the hot, cloudless June weather.
DAUDET
A brief peace, broken by my need for bromide with its side effects of depression and memory loss, and the chloral, which leaves me tired and on edge. Before I returned to morphine, from which I wake in the night in a vacuum with no sense of time and place, with no sense of myself as a person, with no ideas.
DE MONTALK
With only, as you have written, ‘a sense of EXTRAORDINARY moral blindness’.
DAUDET
Morphine—the only true analgesic. The unpredictable rages it provokes, the interference with my writing and dreams. It makes me unkind to Julia and the children.
DE MONTALK
Side effects—no drug of relief is without them. Yet you’ve also said that morphine makes you talkative, takes you out of yourself.
DAUDET
Morphine has helped me to function. Without it, who knows what I would have become?
DE MONTALK
Marcel Proust—Lucien’s friend—recalls you self-injecting. He writes about this in Contre Sainte-Beuve, a collection of notes published in 1954, like La Doulou more than 30 years posthumously.
DAUDET
Young Proust, ah yes. And Sainte-Beuve—he had an affair with Hugo’s wife. At Hugo’s funeral I struggled to sign my name in the book, in the presence of other mourners.
page 38DE MONTALK
Proust refuted Sainte-Beuve’s contention that one can only understand the work of an artist by understanding the artist’s biography. He believed the hidden self, the inner biography, the experiences processed and stored in the memory—the song within an author—was of greater importance.
DAUDET
Sainte-Beuve suffered much hidden pain in retirement. Like you, he was unable to sit and had to write lying or standing. His doctors were unable to diagnose the problem. People would ask after his back, but as far as we knew his back was sound. After his post-mortem, it was rumoured the pain had been caused by the stone.
DE MONTALK
I have to wonder—about the stone.
On the subject of morphine, and Proust’s recollection, he writes that during a discussion on courage you retired, without explanation, to an adjoining room. He later learned your pain had intensified. When you returned, your brow was perspiring as if in the wake of a struggle, but your breathing was easy, calmed by victory.
DAUDET
He remembers correctly.
DE MONTALK
Proust was in awe of your courage. His own suffering, he says, was of no consequence by comparison. He describes you as ‘the poet whose approach turned pain into poetry, as iron is magnetised when brought near a magnet’.
DAUDET (making a sweeping motion)
Supposition and long-windedness bother me. One needs to pass through theory and into the picture.
*
page 39At this point, as if prompted, Daudet excused himself and, with the aid of his cane, left the room. A door opened and shut, further down the hall.
I took the opportunity to look over the table where he wrote very slowly and revised, revised, revised. ‘I am never satisfied with my work,’ he had confessed earlier. ‘My novels I always used to pen myself. I could never dictate a novel. However, lately, I’ve relied on my family’s assistance.’
In the wake of the family’s recent move, the floor was cluttered with small boxes tightly packed with hard-backed jotters, canvases beneath dust covers, plants growing in copper holders. And the workspace was piled with papers and books, of which I listed the yellowed (sulphur stained?) pages of Montaigne whose reassurance and advice he was never without, Pascal, the master of style, Tacitus whom he translated one page at a time, Schopenhauer’s dark ‘arguments and picturesque aphorisms’. There were also Rousseau, whom he defended against those who railed against sexual transgression; Napoleon on campaign; undertakings in Africa; a mission to Madagascar; an expedition to the North Pole.
Here, I thought, he keeps his disease on a lead. Here, he hides his pain beneath a table.
After a brief intermission, I heard a door shut and the halting sound of Daudet’s progress along the hall—reminiscent of the far off sound of Philoctetes approaching the stage, crawling, dragging his festering foot and leg. ‘To reach this armchair, to go across the waxed floor of the corridor,’ Daudet had written of his worsening pain and ataxia, ‘requires as much effort and ingenuity as Stanley used in an African forest.’
He entered the room, assisted by Ebner, carrying a pillow, which he offered as ‘a little extra height for your head.’ His forehead appeared moist. ‘He observes rather than imagines,’ writes the author and critic Edmund Gosse. ‘And he does this . . . as a “realist”, as one who depends on little green books of notes, and docketed bundles of pièces justificatives.’
I positioned the pillow. What would Daudet observe about me: my bobbed hair, travel trousers, shoulder bag and corduroy jacket? He took the shell from its box and held it to the lamp. Turned it this way page 40 and that. Smiled. Propped it against his pipe. Watched it gleam blue, silver and green.
*
DE MONTALK
Can we revisit the notes you made about the sufferers you met at the mineral pools? Léon writes that their subtlety and completeness astonished Parisian physicians. He describes you as recording the ‘secret wretchedness of men, women and aged men [ . . . ] discreetly, with the wisdom of a physician-poet’. ‘Entire lives,’ he says, ‘are summed up in a few lines.’ He quotes you: ‘Misers turned to spendthrifts. Violent men become timorous.’
DAUDET (running his hand through his hair)
As I say to Léon, ‘Poetry is deliverance’.
DE MONTALK
Léon—who published over forty books including a second memoir, Quand vivait mon père, in 1940—makes the point that while scientific knowledge of pain fills but a few pages, the observations of pain made by a poet may be infinite. Was La Doulou intended as a work of poetry or fiction?
DAUDET
Neither. I envisaged an honest confession—dictante dolore, with pain dictating—of moving through pain and disability towards death. But, writing as a husband and father, I was reluctant to express the unsettling thoughts and longing for death that illness provokes, to compare suffering as the lynchpin of a family, with suffering on one’s own. I wanted to leave no suggestion of complaint against those I loved. Goncourt and I discussed a work of fact incorporated within fiction. I doubt I’ll write it now.
DE MONTALK
The ‘terrible and implacable breviary’, to quote Léon, appeared instead. The text frequently calls for poetic form:
page 41
I struggle to sleep
without chloral.
Behind my closed eyes
the earth splits.
Chasms open right and left.
Short naps turn
into nightmares
of vertiginous skidding,
sliding,
crashing into the abyss.
When the garden awakes.
The blackbird’s song
patterns the pale window.
DAUDET
I wrote only poetry in the beginning—until I gave in to prose, working for newspapers in order to make a living.
DE MONTALK
Why did La Doulou not take the form you envisaged?
DAUDET
Julia thought it might be interpreted as a curtain fall on my writing life. She influences all my compositions. There’s not a page published on which she has not scattered flecks of her fine bright mind.
*
Daudet stopped and blew his nose. I remembered Les Femmes d’artistes and the paragraph in which he writes of his marriage:
I love my wife with all my heart. [ . . . ] Marriage has been for me a port with calm and safe waters, not one where you tie your boat up to a ring on the bank at the risk of rusting there forever, but one of those blue coves where you repair sails and masts for new excursions to unknown countries.page 42
*
DE MONTALK
Was Julia also concerned that writing about pain, in addition to living it, would bring you down? Or that making your ailment public would harm your reputation?
DAUDET
Not once, neither at the doctor’s nor the spas, has the disease been given its real name. Mostly, I’m held to have ‘rheumatisms’. More formally, I have a disease of the bone marrow, or a degeneration of the nervous system—which is, of course, accurate.
DE MONTALK
Could your contemplation of suicide have been a factor? Julia begged you to think of the children.
DAUDET
Above all, I didn’t want to worry her. I didn’t want to worry any of my family. I took the view, as I told Ebner, that ‘Suffering is nothing—the difficult thing is to avoid making those one loves suffer.’ Not that they’re always taken in.
DE MONTALK
Ebner quotes you saying just this. He recalls an occasion on which Julia entered your study as you were sharing your pain with a friend. Your body was slumped, your head was bent, your ‘loins’ were being tortured, you said, as if with a hot poker. Upon seeing the doorknob turn, you quickly stood, smiled and replied strongly, in response to her question, that all was well.
DAUDET
Pain soon becomes mundane to onlookers, even those closest to us. Compassion fades. I attempt to keep my ordeal to myself to protect others, and as a matter of pride—in order not to see tedium in their eyes.
page 43DE MONTALK
What of those who suffer alone—who have no family or friends with whom to share their anguish?
DAUDET
For me, the easiest way to be in pain is to be alone, like a mole in a burrow, free of explanations, expectations, the limitations I place on my family.
DE MONTALK
I have a photograph of you and Julia, taken five years ago in the garden of your country house at Champrosay. You sit on a slatted seat. Julia stands alongside, holding a folded parasol. You tilt your head, and feign interest with a half-smile. Your face seems pallid, even in black and white. I sense fragility. For some time, you’d been finding writing a challenge—a test of will and endurance?
DAUDET
By then my writing had become a daily exercise of effort and willpower, of binding myself to the fixed moment at which I’d seat myself at the table and challenge my illness. I felt my life was effectively over. I lived instead through my novels.
DE MONTALK
These challenges have resulted in some ten publications and plays since 1885 when tabes declared itself and the pain became almost constant. What have been your motifs during the twelve years of greatest pain? I’ve listed: adventure, reminiscence, satire, romance and the pitfalls of divorce, jealousy, studies of the stage, the purifying effects of true love in La Fedor, and contrasts within families in Soutienne de famille, to be published next year. These topics seem to be consistent with your pre-tabes oeuvre, written from the heart of humour, sadness and ‘living fact’. To which work do you feel closest?
DAUDET
Of all I’ve written—and since I’ll always love the South—Lettres de mon moulin remains my favourite book. I write according to my page 44 surroundings. For some ten years now, I’ve been mostly surrounded by Paris.
DE MONTALK
And by pain: except that physical distress as a theme doesn’t feature. It has been said that something of the natural energy and allure of your writing has been absent since Sappho was published in 1884.
DAUDET
One only has to imagine the torture of living within a wall that is gradually tightening, adding one constraint to another.
DE MONTALK
Do the distraction of writing and the impetus of responsibility—of maintaining your place in the family—help to hold back the wall?
DAUDET
My responsibilities and anxieties as a father and head of a household are certainly an incentive to keeping me on my feet. As is comparison with the less fortunate—with sufferers for whom financial hardship and a lack of warmth, food, wine and affection are added to their misery.
DE MONTALK
In a conversation with Léon, in his first memoir, you keep returning to the ‘alliance between pity and pain’—an alliance seen in your writing, in poignancy arising from pity for human misery, as much as in irony prompted by your observations of absurdity. Are your acts of pity in daily life a manifestation of compassion through pain?
DAUDET
Living in pain can isolate people, and cause them to lose touch with the reality of the wider world. Self-pity can then become overwhelming. I remind myself that there are heavier burdens than mine. In this way, I have pity left to expend on others. I advise sufferers to concentrate on ‘active pity’ rather than ‘useless fears’. You’ll be aware that many philosophers dismiss pity as a product of weakness.
page 45DE MONTALK
In Much Ado About Nothing when Antonio speaks of self-pity as shameful, Leonato rejoins there has never been a philosopher who patiently endured toothache!
DAUDET
If one has never been cold or hungry, or otherwise suffered, one cannot imagine, or speak about any of those things.
Something else to consider is that for the person in pain, the torment is always new. But to family and friends—even those who by nature are most compassionate—the witness of suffering can become a stale habit. I say to the sick: Don’t try to convey your pain to those who cannot imagine it, find distractions, wrestle to the end.
DE MONTALK
You’ve written of the difficulty of shouting to your children ‘Long live life’ when you are ‘ripped apart by pain’.
DAUDET
True. The Stoics championed the benefits of constantly exercising one’s energy. I, however, recommend exercising the imagination—if one is so gifted. I suggest piling up one’s sufferings to form a mountain from which the beauty and grandeur of the climb can be appreciated. In this way, inconsequential hardships fade into the background, and everything else falls into its natural place. Had I not been afflicted, I might have inflated my view of myself as an ‘Author’, becoming prey to the petty rivalries and hollow vanities of those who write. Naturally, I still have weaknesses, but to some extent I’ve been purified—by the climb.
DE MONTALK
You’ve reminded me of the actress in La Fedor, who squanders her life in wild living. She comes to know one ideal love—a love by which she’s purified, but at the cost of her art and her life.
Léon suggests that your thinking, like that of Pascal, became purified by the courage needed to endure pain—as a result of which you reached a terrestrial serenity though pity. He writes that ‘great page 46 pain leads to either meanness and belligerence, or pity’ and you ‘chose the second way’. He sees your will to work and contribute to family life as standing amidst your literary achievements. Does pain leads to moral and intellectual growth?
DAUDET
Only up to a certain point.
DE MONTALK
Beyond which?
DAUDET
It steals your energy and sours your life, and you must decide whether to take the path of bitterness or pity.
DE MONTALK
Léon also writes—in Devant la Douleur, published in 1916—that in the face of continuing pain, even medicine seeks to escape. He insists it’s important to combat this withdrawal. In this respect he’s calling for a rhetoric of pain. What are your thoughts?
DAUDET
Just that there is nothing customary about pain. Each pain is individual and fluctuates, like a performer’s voice, according to the auditorium’s acoustics.
DE MONTALK
La Doulou seems to be as much about your search for language as about voicing the pain experience.
DAUDET
This has never occurred to me.
DE MONTALK
You say, ‘We should have a term to define the crisis through which I am passing.’ Also, that no words, only screams could ‘render’ the torture. And you speak of a note you have scribbled as ‘unexpressive page 47 and secret’ having meaning ‘only for me, for I have written it in one of my cruel indispositions’.
DAUDET
Part of you slides out of sight if you are unable to communicate your pain.
*
He shaded his eyes with his hand. I asked if we had spoken for too long and offered to leave. Daudet shook his head emphatically, stretched his left leg, straightened in his chair. I continued cautiously, aware that he counselled and instructed regardless of discomfort.
*
DE MONTALK
I am interested in your dual relationship with pain.
On the one hand, you personify pain with a capital P, refer to it as ‘the most despotic and possessive of Imperial hostesses’, lament the endless days when the only part of you that’s alive is Pain, invite it to be your ‘philosophy’, your ‘science’, a travel destination.
On the other hand, you objectify pain with graphic and uncompromising descriptions.
DAUDET
Yes, like many writers, I have a dual disposition. There’s an authorial Me who observes, sees into things and describes. And a responsive Me who weeps, struggles and suffers. Even as a child I was aware I had two sides.
DE MONTALK
Your stark accounts alongside moments of deep understanding illustrate a duality of watching and feeling.
page 48DAUDET (leaning forward)
I’m extremely myopic, as a result of which I feel and listen to people, landscapes, wherever I might be in the world, as much as I look at them.
DE MONTALK
Just as you gauged the mood of the sick at Lamalou, in the Hotel Mas’s little garden—where you reassured the nervous, comforted the despairing and let everyone glimpse the possibility of a positive outcome.
DAUDET
Hope on the scaffold of loss. I met with the distressed and shared their martyrdom. I told them that their doctors don’t know any more than they do, and many know even less than they do. I found our conversations consoling—while soothing others I soothed myself.
DE MONTALK
I’m trying to write about pain. I’m finding this difficult, even though English comprises over one million words! I identify with what you describe as the ‘bitter disproportion between what my pen determines and what my mind has conceived’.
DAUDET
Physical pain, unlike most illnesses, is slippery. Its expression can only be guided by style—style as a state of intensity.
DE MONTALK
The greatest number of things in the fewest number of words.
DAUDET
Some people possess the innate gifts of taste and tact that constitute style, and instinctively choose the right words. But minds of that sort are rare.
page 49DE MONTALK
Specificity. Refinement. Imaginative prompting. La Doulou—a decade of pain on small pages.
Sounds from the shower—
tiled walls echoing
voices,
water;
the precise click
of foils
from the practice room;
the deep sadness
these absences cause me—
the physical life
I have lost.
DAUDET
Impressions. Flashes of light and colour. Music. The juxtaposition of colours and sounds. All these are important. Remember, too, Pascal, who wrote: ‘Let no one say that I have said anything new; the arrangement of the subject is new.’
DE MONTALK
Edmund Gosse describes you as an impressionist painter.
DAUDET
When I was London, two years ago, we met at dinner—
*
Daudet paused, interrupted by a tap at the door. I turned, hoping to see Julia, but no one entered.
*
page 50DAUDET
After dessert I described the Nîmes melon harvest when I was a boy— the white marketplace, the masses of fruit, the morning light . . . Are you comfortable? We should talk on.
DE MONTALK
I’m fine, but I don’t want to tire you.
DAUDET
I come to life in the presence of strangers. I can even appear to be in perfect health. I want to know more about your country with its limitations on convalescence, and about the future with its cure of syphilis and restrictions on opium. I wonder which of my works are still read. Tell me about the book beneath your notepad.
DE MONTALK
It’s a work of science fiction set in a bar, where there’s a law that says joy shared is joy increased, and pain shared is pain lessened. The patrons include a vampire and a talking parrot—and Time Travellers who must pay cash for their drinks!
DAUDET
It reaches a long way into the future.
*
He stopped. Rubbed his thighs as if distracting his pain. Clasped his thin hands. Stared at the paua shell. Looked towards the door.
POSTSCRIPT
A month after this interview, on 16 December 1897, Daudet, aged fifty-seven, died during an evening meal with his family. He was chatting and sipping soup when his head fell back and his breathing became laboured. He was laid on the carpet. Doctors arrived and pulled rhythmically on his tongue (the mode of resuscitation briefly in practice) for over an hour, to the distress of Julia and her mother, Léon, Lucien and Edmée. When this failed, ‘faradisation of the page 51 diaphragm’—the intermittent application of an electrical current to the midriff—was attempted. The cause of death was reported as apoplexy.
A few days earlier, Daudet had attended a dinner in memory of Honoré de Balzac. As he returned home in his carriage, invigorated, he remarked to Léon, ‘Such love fests are indispensable. They whip the spirit up, they beautify things. By exchanging ideas we penetrate each other’s brains. We see the same fact and the same event appreciated in all kinds of ways in accordance with the character and the habits of different men.’
NOTES
Alphonse Daudet’s dialogue and surroundings are both imagined and factually based. I have paraphrased a number of his sourced responses for narrative purposes as my own free translations and presented them selectively, at times as composite passages, without referencing. Significant sources in this regard include Daudet’s La Doulou (1930), translated in 1934 as Suffering by Milton Garver, and in 2002 as In the Land of Pain by Julian Barnes, and Leon Daudet’s Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir (1897/2007), translated by Charles de Kay. The following references and notes are by page number:
23 ‘within the narrow bed of [their] flesh’: Zbigniew Herbert, ‘The Hygiene of the Soul’, The Collected Poems: 1996–1998 (2007), p. 215.
‘as controversial of any evidence’: Leigh Gillmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001), p. 24.
‘a balance sheet’: Le Journal, 27 December 1897, quoted in the appendix to
Suffering (1930/1934), p.65.
24 ‘his genius triumphs’: ‘In the French Capital the Publication of Daudet’s New Novel, La Fedor, is the Literary Event of the Day’, Roland Strong, The New York Times, 30 May 1897.
‘It was the hour of intimacies’: Les Femmes d’artistes, quoted in ‘An Appreciation of Alphonse Daudet by Andre Ebner’, in Suffering, p. 84.
25 ‘handsome, subtly and nervously handsome’: Les Romanciers Naturalistes, quoted by Sebastian Dieguez and Julien Bogousslavsky in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists: Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience (Volume 19, ed. J. Bogousslavsky, F. Boller, 2005), p. 19.
‘all the youth, vigor and drive’: In the Land of Pain, p. 4.
‘My father’s welcome’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 192.
page 5226 ‘wretchedness, dangerous escapades’: Ernest Daudet, ‘The Daudet Family: My Brother and I’, Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 351.
‘delicate transpositions’: Bernard Swift, The Oxford Companion to Literature in French (ed. Peter France, 1995), p. 221.
27 ‘Vendor of Happiness’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir. Léon writes, ‘My father was often wont to repeat: “When my task is finished I should like to establish myself as a Vendor of Happiness; my profits would consist in my success.”’, p. 89.
30 ‘lucid pity’: Suffering, p. 2.
‘The street carriages passing’: In the Land of Pain, p. 68.
‘band of pain’: In the Land of Pain, p. 26.
‘orchestra of suffering’: Suffering, p. 19.
‘I’m in pain’: In the Land of Pain, p 3.
‘I am suffering’: Suffering, p. 3.
31 ‘in images that because’: Richard Eder, ‘Another Country’, The New York Times, 2 February 2003.
32 ‘the fierce necessity of confessing myself’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 96.
‘Daudet, you should relate to this’: Quand Vivait Mon Père, p. 113, quoted in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, p. 24.
33 ‘I’ve been saving you up’: In the Land of Pain, p. 19.
Used as a treatment for alcoholism and range of neurological and glandular disorders, gold chloride was known to induce ‘aphrodisiac effects’ (Samuel Otway Lewis Potter, Materia Medica, 1894), to ‘act as a powerful sexual stimulant’ (H.A. Hare, Text Book of Practical Therapeutics, 1912); similarly, neurologist Charles-Eduard Brown-Sequard’s hypodermic injections of testicular venous blood and other ‘juices’ of guinea pigs (and monkeys and dogs). Could these remedies, the responses to which are now thought to have been placebo effects, have contributed to the continuance of Daudet’s famous libido despite his pain and debilitation?
35 Montaigne writes: ‘The very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person.’ ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne (2009), p. 61.
Tut, man, one fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
‘The illness of a neighbour’: In the Land of Pain, p. 5.
36 ‘Crucifixion, that’s what it was’: In the Land of Pain, p. 24.
37 ‘an EXTRAORDINARY sensation’: Suffering, p. 32.
38 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1802–1869) was a literary critic. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition. page 53 http://www.1902encyclopaedia.com/S/SA/charles-augustin-sainte-beuve.html
‘the poet whose approach’: Marcel Proust, ‘Opinions: On M. Alphonse Daudet’, La Presse, 11 August 1897, quoted in Suffering, p. 70.
39 ‘arguments and picturesque aphorisms’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 35.
‘To reach this armchair’: Suffering, p. 35.
40 ‘And he does this’: Edmund Gosse, French Profiles (1913), p. 122.’.
‘the secret wretchedness’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 93–94.
‘Poetry is deliverance’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 96.
41 ‘terrible and implacable breviary’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 96.
42 ‘I love my wife’: Suffering, p. 84.
‘Suffering is nothing’: Suffering, p. 87.
43 ‘a photograph’: ‘Daudet and his wife Julia at Champrosay, c. 1892’, In the Land of Pain.
44 ‘alliance between pity and pain’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 100.
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
‘Long live life’: Suffering, p. 37.
46 ‘great pain leads to’: Quand Vivait Mon Père, p. 238, quoted in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, p. 38. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), mathematician, scientist, religious philosopher, suffered severe chronic pain, possibly due to stomach cancer.
47 ‘You say’: Suffering, p. 5, p. 11, p. 34.
‘the most despotic’: In the Land of Pain, p. 42.
‘philosophy’, ‘science’: In the Land of Pain, p. 42.
48 ‘English comprises over one million words’: The Global Language Monitor, 1 January 2012, in conjunction with a Google/Harvard Study, reports 1,013,913 words in the English language.
The ‘bitter disproportion’: Charles Mantoux, Alphonse Daudet et la Souffrance Humaine (1941), p. 24, and Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, p. 39.
49 ‘Let no one say’: Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1958), ‘Thoughts on Mind and on Style’, Section 22, p. 7.
50 ‘It’s a work of science fiction’: Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon (1977).
51 ‘Such love fests are indispensible’: Alphonse Daudet: A Memoir, p. 126.