POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Maupassant chapter:

Maupassant’s last sane year, 1891, was a restless one. He moved from place to place, avoiding the air and noise of Paris which he said caused horrendous headaches. “The dreadful pain racks in a way no torture could equal, shatters the head, drives one crazy, bewilders the ideas, and scatters the memory like dust before the wind. A sick headache had laid hold of me, and I was perforce obliged to lie down in my bunk with a bottle of ether under my nostrils.” (Roger Williams suggests that the headaches were an expression of repressed hostility, a vegetative neurosis originating in a repressed hostility to his family. )

Maupassant identified with dogs who howl: “their howling—is a lamentable complaint addressed to nobody, going nowhere, telling you nothing.” At the same time he felt at the top of his form, planning a book, L’angélus, which he thought was to be his best: “I feel admirably fit to write this book. I have it all perfectly in my head. It was all thought out with an astonishing facility. It will be the crowning of my literary career.”

But he feared madness and spoke often of suicide. Frank Harris wrote:

Three or four years before the end, Maupassant knew that the path of self-indulgence for him led directly to madness and untimely death. . . . First an orgy brought on fits of partial blindness, then acute neuralgic pains and periods of sleeplessness, while his writing showed terrible fears. . . Then came desperate long-continued depression broken by occasional exaltations and excitements. . . . and always, always, the indescribable mental agony he spoke of as indicible malaise.

While riding a bicycle, Maupassant fainted and bruised his ribs. He wrote to his mother that his bruises were painful, but announced that his health was suddenly admirable; he planned three weeks of fashionable life in Paris to prepare for more work. Once there, though, he suffered a depression. In November he reported from Cannes: “There are whole days on which I feel I am done for, finished, blind, my brain used up and yet still alive. . . . . I have not a single idea that is consecutive to the one before it. I forget words, names of everything, and my hallucinations and my pains tear me to pieces.” He imagined that the salt baths he had been giving his nostrils had started a salty fermentation in his brain, and that the dissolved brain was flowing back through his nose. In Paris he announced that he had been made a count and insisted on being so addressed. Goncourt’s journal recorded that in literary circles it was agreed that Maupassant had lost his mind.

At Christmas time he took two women sailing and seemed to be all right, but then he complained that he had just seen a ghost. New Year’s day marked the turning point. At a quarter past two in the morning his servant found him with his throat gashed. “You see, François, what I have done. I have cut my throat. It’s a case of sheer madness.” He had also tried to shoot himself, but the wound was not serious. A doctor sewed him up and put him in a straightjacket. After being comatose for the day, he woke to announce that he must go to the frontier: war had been declared. His friends took him to see his boat, hoping it would orient him. On 6 January Maupassant was taken to Paris, still in restraints, and placed in the celebrated asylum of Dr. Ésprit Blanche in Passy.

Over the next months he was at times rational, delighting his visitors with hilarious stories; at other times he hallucinated, was violent, and had to be restrained. From April on, the decline was rapid. A doctor kept a daily record. His last letters
speak of vast fortunes of gold nuggets and buried treasure. He imagined he was the wealthy younger son of the Virgin Mary. He planted twigs around the gardens expecting them to sprout into baby Maupassants. He licked the walls of his cell, and retained his urine thinking it was made of diamonds and jewels. He howled like a dog, recalling his fantasy of envying the dog its expression of anguish. When his thoughts seemed to escape from his head, he anxiously asked around after them (“You haven’t seen my thoughts anywhere, have you?”), and he glowed with happiness when he thought he had found them in the form of butterflies colored by mood—black sadness, pink merriment, and purple adulteries. He tired to catch the imaginary butterflies as they flitted by.

At the end he was violent and had to wear mechanical restraints. When he died on 7 July, 1893, his attendant said he went out like a lamp that has no more oil. His last words were reported to be “des ténèbres, des ténèbres”—darkness, darkness.