‘Charles VI bedridden and his physician’, Chroniques de Jean Froissart, Book IV, 1389–1400.
CHAPTER V
26 February 1382, the thirteen-year-old Charles VI of France rides into Rouen, accompanied, because of his age, by his regent, the Duke of Anjou. This is his first real test as king, just two years into his reign. The city, the second largest in the kingdom, is in revolt at the reimposition of taxes by the new monarch, and he is here to put down this uprising and stop any further damage to public buildings after the destruction of the city’s tax records.
The revolt is led by a journeyman draper who has assembled a mob of fellow workers. We are right in the middle of the Hundred Years War against the English Plantagenets. Rouen’s population has also endured recurrent bouts of plague. The new commodities taxes are the last straw.
Charles assesses the damage. Rouen, sitting on the river Seine in Normandy, is a prosperous regional trading centre. The cobbled streets around its magnificent cathedral groan with trades premises in half-timbered buildings, all the shopfronts closed up today because of the riots. Coils of smoke and angry shouts cut the grey winter sky.
Charles and his entourage gather the names of the ringleaders and oversee the executions.
One of the smoke trails rising behind the town square is not a product of the unrest. If you were to follow it, it would lead you to a pair of locked gates at the end of an alley in the heart of the old city. Behind these gates sits a row of industrial workshops specialising in the manufacture of a new product. If Charles had cared to leave his attendants and wander up this alley, even approach the gate and take a look through the keyhole, across the courtyard, and through the partially open doors leading off it, he would have seen a series of furnaces glowing in the recesses. Pots of wood ash, too, and of sand. Four-foot-long blowpipes propped against the wall.
The insignia above the gates show that these are successful family businesses. Smartly dressed men just behind the gates guard the premises. Before the keyhole is blocked by one of these guards, the king might catch a glimpse of the disc bullions of plate glass laid out for despatch, each one carefully wrapped and stacked on a cart. Diamonds of thinner glass wait in other piles across the courtyard, to be matched with lead lattice windows in the houses of the gentry. They say you can see through it but it’s strong. It would break if dropped. The artisans are still at work here, apparently not part of the uprising. Some are hiding from it. They have been targeted that day along with the other wealthy institutions.
Glass has already existed for a thousand years, and Charles is familiar with it. First there’s his father’s drinking vessels, and then the stained-glass windows at cathedrals like Chartres.1 Glassmakers mastered this ‘crown’ glass in the 1340s and it is a particularly useful variety. It can be used to keep fresh food, for magnification and, most commercially, to protect buildings from the elements while providing an expansive view. Diamond shapes are cut out of the thinner portion of the glass disc and mounted in a lead lattice for larger, showier windows.
It is conceivable that the young Charles came across the glassworks on his excursion to Rouen. Given that they were an important centre of industry in the city, he might have been introduced that day to a foreman. He could then have made the connection between the artefacts coming out of the furnaces and the diaper glass in the windows of the palaces. This very new, alchemical work was going on, just out of sight.
The Rouen methods were a highly prized trade secret. The few families who shared it acquired a status almost equal to nobility. The clandestine nature of the operations kept the production local and meant that this particular kind of glass was not available in London for another three centuries. There had been a rival centre of glass in Murano, near Venice, from the 1290s, but the exceptionally clear glass for which Murano would become world famous was not invented until 1500. Plate glass of the kind made in Rouen was, at that time, the clearest ever seen.
This collision of place and time – the young Charles in Rouen at the same time as this art was developing – is noteworthy given what happened a few years later.
This very same French king, Charles VI, became the first publicised case of a person who believed his whole body, not just a part of it, was made of glass.
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, recorded in his chronicles that Charles refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself.2 He was reported to have wrapped himself in blankets to prevent his buttocks from breaking.
Charles VI’s reign was dominated by countless battles with the English over who was to rule the kingdom of France – the largest in Western Europe at the time – as well as by internal feuding within the kingdom itself. One of Charles’ recent predecessors, John the Good (John II), had been captured by the Black Prince, the heir to the English throne, at Poitier and taken back to England to be ransomed. It was precarious ruling France at this time. Charles would be defeated by Henry V at Agincourt, and while the age of chivalry was at its height, French society itself was fragile and threatening to fragment. The appeal of glass, a wondrous new material, as a metaphor for a person’s sense of themselves, is not difficult to understand in this context. To be made of glass is to be precious − rare, but fragile; it is an instruction to others to admire you, but not to get too close. There is something essentially magical, spectral about glass – it’s the stuff of fairy-tale glass slippers, you can see through it, but you know it’s there. It’s hard but technically somewhere between a solid and a liquid. Cathedral windows are thicker at the bottom than at the top, giving the impression that the material has continued to flow imperceptibly (it’s actually because the glazers put the thicker edges of the glass at the bottom) and the glass has a life of its own.
The glass legs of Charles VI of France spoke eloquently of the chaotic political situation he found himself in. Glass perfectly symbolises a sense of both supreme refinement and a nail-biting sense of vulnerability and contingency. But Charles did more than champion the poetic possibilities of glass. Many people found it an appealing metaphor for the ambitions and fears in their lives. He turned himself into the stuff. What was influencing him? What brought about a glass delusion?
Various physicians and historians chronicled Charles VI’s life and traumas, attempting to trace the cause of his mental instability. The religious order of St Denis claimed to be first-hand witness to many formative episodes. Jean Froissart gave his spin a few years later in a colourful illuminated prose history of the Hundred Years War, complete with lively pictures, and the cleric and historian Jean Juvénal des Ursins produced a more sober history.
According to the order of St Denis in April 1392 the twenty-four-year-old Charles VI was in Amiens when he suffered from an extremely high temperature that lasted for weeks, probably as a result of contracting typhoid.
His mental state became increasingly volatile: when out on an expedition on 5 August 1392 he apparently saw a man dressed in rags in the forest in Le Mans. Froissart says the apparition pursued the king for nearly half an hour, resisting the many armed men who were with him, even surviving several blows of the king’s sword, before disappearing as inexplicably as he arrived. Charles apparently became frenzied, paranoid, lashing out even at his own soldiers, crying out: ‘they want to hand me over to my enemies.’ He spurred his horse and rushed from the scene.
The supposed eyewitness in the order of St Denis remembered it a bit differently. It wasn’t an apparition, but a ‘a wretch’.3 Froissart described ‘a man, head and feet bare, dressed in a beautiful burel dimension’,4 and Juvénal embellished the story with an account of the king killing four of his knights in his frenzy as he left the scene.5
Charles apparently didn’t remember any of it, and, according to Froissart, suffered another high fever.
On 23 January 1393 Charles was involved in a horrific accident at a masked ball. A celebration had been staged for a wedding and a group of men dressed as hairy satyrs to perform an entertainment were set on fire by a stray naked flame. Charles was among these satyrs as the fire raged. He was whisked away from the carnage of what became known as ‘le Bal des Ardents’, ‘the Ball of the Burning Men’.
Another episode heralded the start of his glass delusion. A member of the order of St Denis remembered the occasion in August 1395 when Charles, now twenty-six, failed to recognise his own family. We might think of it now as a ‘disorder of recognition’, to use Joseph Capgras’s expression. Et qui n’est chaque fois ni tout a fait la même, ni tout a fait une autre. The fragment of poetry that captures ‘Madame M’s confusion at her daughter’s doubles might be fitting for our king, too. Charles became agitated at his own distorted perception, manic, and it was out of this state that his glass delusion first emerged:
He often ran two and fro in his palace, until his strength was completely exhausted… The king also claimed that he was made of glass, clad himself with iron splints, feared breaking when falling, etc. And he supposed himself sometimes to be of glass, not to be touched, he was suffering. He inserted the clothes on a rod of iron…6
Charles’s condition is depicted in an illustration to Froissart’s fourteenth-century chronicles. He is in bed, attended by courtiers, one of whom presents him with some sort of elixir. It is contained, appropriately enough, in a precious clear-glass decanter. He’s been handed down to us like this, a caricature of a ‘mad king’, with cushions tied to his backside. This is Charles as a symbol of the lottery of primogeniture, in a line of ‘mad kings’, like Lear raging in the storm. If you’re going to have a hereditary, divine right monarchy, the image says, this is the flipside. Traces of Charles the man are harder to find, never mind a nuanced picture of his formative experiences and influences. We are left with a very few (presumably apocryphal) anecdotes to patch together.
The details of Charles’s life get lost in the phenomenon that glass delusion became, and that he came to represent. It’s a phenomenon that lasted for centuries, and spread way beyond the French court. Cases grew over the sixteenth-century Europe and continued to flourish well into the seventeenth.
The people recording the story as it unrolls refer back to Charles again and again. He’s a puzzling case and still the most renowned sufferer of glass delusion more than two hundred years later when Burton began compiling his encyclopedia of melancholy. At this point cases were concentrated among the wealthy and educated classes of men (although, of course, physicians rarely saw other categories of people). This led contemporary scholars to associate it with the better-known disorder of ‘scholar’s melancholy’. Sufferers were observed to be normal in every respect, bar the belief that they had turned to glass. As a result, they could function relatively well, albeit remaining anxious in case anyone came too close and risked shattering their fragile limbs.
For the aristocracy this was a ‘delusion of grandeur’ in reverse. ‘Madame M’ believed she was related to King Louis. A bona fide princess, Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria, believed she had swallowed a glass piano and insisted, for obvious reasons, that people should not get too close. It caught the private imagination of non-royals, too. In 1583 Tomaso Garzoni reports a Glass Man travelling to Murano. He plans to fling himself into a kiln and be transformed into a goblet.7 Another case features a scholar who believed that the surface of the world was made of glass, beneath which lurked a tangle of serpents. He did not dare leave his bed, fearing he would smash the glass and fall in among the snakes. Painters of ‘Vanitas’ put hourglasses into still lives to remind viewers of the fragility and transience of life.
Distressing material changes in the body often feature in the content of delusions but ‘glass delusion’ was different. Robert Burton’s includes many ‘hypochondriacal’ delusions of the body in The Anatomy of Melancholy, like the baker in Renaissance Italy who thought he was made of butter and wouldn’t go near his bread ovens, or man who ‘thinks he is a nightingale, and therefore sings all the night long’, or the people who are ‘all cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead; some are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders’.
Glass delusion is different. In Burton’s schema, glass delusion sits with a sketchier subset of examples with the people who ‘Fear of devils, death, that they shall be so sick, of some such or such disease, ready to tremble at every object, they shall die themselves forthwith, or that some of their dear friends or allies are certainly dead; imminent danger, loss, disgrace still torment others’. Here are those who ‘are all glass, and therefore will suffer no man to come near them’. They are with the people who think they are already dead, who negate themselves and become passive, who stop eating. The historic enigma of Charles VI hides somewhere here, along with possible explanations for him in the broader story of glass and how others reacted to it.
The Franciscan friar and scientist Roger Bacon had described the marvellous properties of the magnifying glass back in the thirteenth century. Glass in its new forms maintained a connection to developing technology, from spectacles to astrological instruments.
By the time glass delusion was at its peak, the science of optics was really taking off. This was the period marked by comets, solar eclipses and conjunctions of the major planets that Burton gazed up at, and studies required specialist optical instruments. The light-accommodating properties of glass also became associated with clairvoyance.
The question of prophecy was a sensitive one, and ‘magical’ lenses were officially frowned upon. James Howell, historiographer to King Charles II and glassmaker by trade, writes in the seventeenth century about the properties of glass. As he stares into a glass kiln, Howell reflects on the alchemical nature of what’s going on in front of him, and sees a metaphor for the earth’s place in the grand scheme of things, destined to be consumed and purified by the holy fires.
… it being a rare kind of knowledge and chemistry to transmute dust and sand (for they are the only main ingredients) to such a diaphanous pellucid dainty body as you see a crystal glass is, which hath this property above gold or silver, or any other mineral, to admit no poison… My thoughts were raised to a higher speculation: that if this small furnace fire hath virtue to convert such a small lump of dark dust and sand into such a precious and clear body as crystal, surely that grand universal fire which shall happen at the day of judgment, may by its violent ardour vitrify and turn to one lump of crystal the whole body of the earth; nor am I the first that fell upon this conceit.8
Francis Spira’s death bed of despair was only fifty miles from Murano, by now the centre of the glass world. He would have known all about glassmaking. Did he see an allegory of damnation and redemption in the process, too? Spira died only five years after Copernicus shocked Europe with the theory that the earth went round the sun and he didn’t escape difficult new questions about man’s place in the universe. He missed the revolution in telescopes that Burton lived through. Burton’s interest in clairvoyance would have given him a natural interest in glass lenses, luminous portals to the unknown.
The historian Gill Speak argues that the phenomenon of glass delusion had become so well known and widespread by the seventeenth century that it was possible to talk about Glass Men as a discrete set within the population.9 In line with Howell’s vision, Speak suggests these Glass Men saw themselves as the product of a ‘purifying fire’. Glass delusion was a symptom of the prevailing religious anxiety about death and the afterlife. A contagion of ideas, and of beliefs, could spread faster than at any time in human history, thanks to the speed with which books could now be copied.
At the same time, glass delusion had become a fashionable literary motif. There were a multitude of references in fiction, the highest profile example being Cervantes’s short story ‘The Glass Graduate’ of 1613. The hero of the tale, Rodaja, is a brilliant student at Salamanca University who is poisoned by a quince, a potion given to him by a worldly lady who has sought his love in vain. She intends the potion to serve as an aphrodisiac, but instead it triggers an illness which lasts a year. It is an illness that develops into a delusion that he has turned into glass. ‘The Glass Graduate’ was republished in Latin, and before the end of the seventeenth century it had been translated into French (1615), Italian (1626), German (1652) and English (1694) and made its way across Europe.10
The German humanist Kaspar von Barth is singled out most often as the model for Rodaja in the Cervantes story. Von Barth reportedly shunned company for ten years, believing that he was made of glass. Cervantes may also have known about an unnamed royal mentioned by the physician to Philip II of Spain who covered himself in straw to avoid smashing (many sufferers went for wool or straw, for self-evident reasons).11 The court physician apparently devised a ‘ruse’, a little trick or white lie, setting fire to the straw. The royal started banging on the door, begging to be released. The physician let him out and then asked him why, if he was made of glass, he hadn’t broken into pieces with all the knocking? The man was instantly cured, or so the physician said.
There are other accounts in which the delusion is simply observed. André du Laurens, a friend of Philip II’s physician (who also mentioned the same unnamed royal) described a melancholic in his Discourses of Melancholike Diseases of 1599 who ‘prayed all that came to see him not to come neare unto him, least they should dash him in pieces’. There was also a ‘great Lord, which thought himselfe to bee glasse, and had not his imagination troubled, otherwise than in this onely thing: he used commonly to sit, and tooke great delight that his friends should come and see him, but so as that he would desire them, that they would not come neere unto him… Another imagined that his feete were made of glasse, and durst not walke least he should have broke them.’12
This lord has one fixed, false idea about himself, but is otherwise behaving within the generally accepted rules. His glass delusion shows its workings here as an effective strategy for social anxiety. Charles VI of France is part of a sizeable group whose glass delusions challenge the idea that royalty and the aristocracy are above that sort of thing simply by accident of their birth.
The phenomenon moves all over the place to other social groups and many cases are serious afflictions. The Amsterdam-based poet and philosopher Caspar Barlaeus, a near contemporary of Robert Burton, talked in his correspondence about his chronic melancholy and the attendant belief that he was made of glass was debilitating. There are tales of people living with glass bones, heads, arms and hearts.13 Sitting down is still something to be afraid of for some people in France centuries after Charles VI. According to a report by Gédéon Tallement des Réaux in 1657, Nicole du Plessi, a relative of Cardinal Richelieu, was terrified that her rear end would shatter.14 The accounts are strikingly consistent. People made of glass all take the same precautions and demand the same care, respect and physical space.
Walkington’s Opticke Glasse, published in London in 1607, features a melancholic Venetian who, just like Charles, is so convinced that his shoulders and buttocks are made of glass that he is afraid to sit down and risk breaking his ‘crackling hinderparts’. Also like Charles, and Cervantes’s Rodajo, he’s experiencing active persecution. He doesn’t venture out in case a passing glazer catches him and melts him down for use in a latticed window.
There were many who refused to take the delusion entirely seriously. Many comedies were written on the subject.
In Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua, or The Combat of the Tongue, and the Five Senses, for Superiority the trickster Tactus is feigning an attack of melancholy and describes the moment he is transformed into glass:
No sooner had I parted out of doors,
But I held up my hands before my face,
To shield mine eyes from th’ light’s piercing beams;
When I protest I saw the sun as clear
Through these my palms, as through a perspective.
No marvel; for when I beheld my fingers,
I saw my fingers were transform’d to glass;
Opening my breast, my breast was like a window,
Through which I plainly did perceive my heart
In whose two concaves I discern’d my thoughts
Confuse’dly lodged in great multitudes.15
Tomkis lampoons the delusion as an affectation and a ploy used by charlatans, just as Shakespeare exposed the fraud of the astrologers. Another sense, Olfactus, joins the debate:
See the strange working of dull melancholy!
Whose drossy thoughts, drying the feeble brain,
Corrupts the sense, deludes the intellect,
And in the soul’s fair table falsely graves.
Whole squadrons of fantastical chimeras
And thousand vain imaginations,
Making some think their heads as big as horses
Some that th’ are dead, some that th’ are turn’d to wolves,
As now it makes him think himself all glass.
Tactus protests:
Olfactus, if thou love’st me, get thee gone;
I am an urinal, I dare not stir
For fear of cracking in the bottom.
Tactus is a glass object – to piss in. He’s a joke. But there’s also a more ominous note. Melancholy here is an insidious force that completely takes a person over, manipulates them and wrecks their judgement so that they think they are wolves, or even that they are dead.
In 1641, the Dutch poet and friend of the philosopher René Descartes, Constantijn Huygens, wrote a popular poem, ‘Costly Folly’, whose subject fears everything that moves:
What’s wrong? Well everywhere he’s touched is made
of glass, you see;
The chairs will be the death of him, he trembles at the bed,
Fearful the one will break his bum, the other smash his head;
Now it’s a kiss appals him, now a flicked finger shocks,
Just as a ship that’s gone off course sails fearful of the rocks.16
This is a pathetic character, too cowardly even for a kiss. But he’s also in mortal danger, like a vessel adrift in the sea. Glass delusions, as with Charles VI, are never straightforwardly funny – they are too disconcerting. Incidentally, Huygens’s son Christian links several of the subjects in this book. He was a brilliant mathematician, astronomer and physicist whose work featured in several of the delusions. In 1659 Christian discovered the true shape of the rings of Saturn, thanks to his work grinding and polishing lenses for telescopes. He also contributed to the science of dynamics – the action of forces on the body – as well as founding the wave theory of light. He even invented the pendulum, which our headless clockmaker (see Chapter VII) will try to exploit for energy in his perpetual motion machine. He also suffered with melancholy.
Huygens’s friend René Descartes, who famously divided the body and mind, is in no mood to try and understand how these ‘fashionable’ delusions function. In the same year as Huygens’s poem his Meditations on First Philosophy expresses shame by association with fellow men and women who make absurd claims: ‘But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and withal escape being classed with others in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapours as to cause them perniciously to assert that they are monarch when they are in the greatest poverty…or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass.’17 This sounds like a new spin on the old imbalance of humours, even demonic forces at work.
The delusion is endlessly satirised, but as with Charles VI, it made people uneasy and couldn’t be dismissed. Glass is a muse for all times, but why did Charles turn himself into it? Plenty of people with an interest in the subject have picked over the biographical scraps trying to further that enquiry.
Someone asked the question in the mid-1920s. Dr Ernest Dupré, a psychiatrist at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, was working on delusions. Dupré was a peer of Joseph Capgras, both men engaged in a subject that was experiencing something of a renaissance. While Capgras pondered ‘Madame M’, her murdered husband and the substitute doubles, Dupré fell upon the case of the ‘Mad King Charles’, thinking it might be a new way into the topic.
In 1925 Dupré wrote an influential book on the pathology of the imagination.18 In it he digests the original chroniclers of Charles VI and writes up a diagnosis of the king’s mental state, putting a twentieth-century lens on the story. The result naturally says as much about France after the First World War as it does that of the fourteenth century. The figure of ‘Mad King Charles’ gets more definition through the eyes of those people who were so stuck into the subject of delusions, pulling together the ideas and terminology from psychiatry and psychoanalysis of the previous two hundred years since Pinel. Dupré has gone back over the sources looking for telling additional details and gives his summation:
During the attacks, we recognise in the picture two orders of symptoms… In the foreground, signs of motor and psychic arousal appear: broken objects, obscene gestures, vociferations, etc. but at other times, and sometimes, it seems, at the same time, the king manifests a despondency, a state of inertia and torpor in which, according to the text of the Religious at St. Denis, he refuses ‘To change shirts and sheets, take baths, shave beard, and finally eat and sleep at set times. He remained silent for long hours’. ‘We never came to see him,’ said Juvénal ‘and he looked at people hard and said nothing.’
Like Burton, his mental imbalance goes back a long way. We see a man who swings from being violently agitated, to depressed and withdrawn to the point of catatonia. Here again is the torpor, the retreat from life and agency demonstrated by ‘Madame M’, Francis Spira and Cervantes’s Rodaja with his ‘four-hour’ faint. Dupré gives his take on the king’s feelings about the deaths at Le Mans:
At other times he suffers, laments, and searches with anguish for what may be the cause of such torments. Fearing the wrath of heaven, he sent donations to the chapters, especially to Saint-Julien du Mans ‘because of the murders he committed’ in the forest. According to Juvénal, he introduces and preserves in his flesh a piece of iron which produces an infected ulcer.
Like Spira, he fears God’s judgement and the burning fires which will consume him. Guilt tortures him to such an extent that he stabs himself, and nurtures the resulting infection as a punishment. More than a hundred years before Francis Spira, he does something that is absolutely forbidden, a sin. He despairs.
Feeling a fear, moreover quite natural at a time and in an environment fertile in criminal poisonings, evoking family memories, he wonders if he is not poisoned, and far from reacting with anger and recriminations, he confines himself, in despair, to begging to be finished. ‘If he is here,’ he said, ‘the one who makes me suffer, I implore him, in the name of Our Lord, not to torment me any more, to make sure that I no longer languish and die.’
A childhood growing up in the French royal family has clearly had an impact. Charles is also paranoid. Or is he bang on the money with his concerns? He would inevitably have watched all manner of skulduggery at work in the royal household, as wars and successions were decided. There wasn’t just capture by the English to fear. Charles has learned the hard way even to be suspicious of what you were given to eat at home in case it was your last meal. Dupré presents the pathology:
To these manifestations of inhibition and depression, it is advisable to compare a set of morbid conceptions that Charles VI, during these crises, frequently expresses: they are delusional ideas of negation and transformation, concerning his personality: he doesn’t have a throne, no coat of arms, no wife, no children. His name is George, he’s made of glass, etc. etc.19
Like Spira, Charles retreats. He refuses his identity, doesn’t recognise his wife or children. Turning himself into glass is just one part of the project of withdrawing from all the ongoing troubles. It’s process of stepping away from himself which sees his identity unravel, throwing off all the trappings that make him who he is, in public at least: a husband, a king, a son, a father, even a ‘Charles’. He leaves behind a glass replica of his body.
In search of the cause of the delusion Dupré now looks past Charles’s early environment, to what he has inherited through the bloodline. He gives a new name to what Burton would have called melancholia:
a heavy morbid heredity is first of all obvious: there exists, especially in the maternal line, many psychopathic antecedents of a mainly depressive nature.
Dupré points to a rumoured history of depression in the female line. Charles’s mother, Joanna of Bourbon, married Charles V when they were both twelve. There are second-hand reports that she experienced episodes of mental instability and had some kind of breakdown when her son Louis, Charles’s younger brother, was born in 1378, when Charles would have been three. Significantly, though, her husband always referred to her as a capable and trusted regent. She died following childbirth, when Charles was nine years old.
In his youth, the King, of robust physical constitution, but of probably mediocre intelligence, debauched, lavish, and always in the grip of sterile agitation, presented himself above all as an imbalance of character and conduct. On this constitutionally insecure ground, at the age of twenty-four, a febrile affection arises (probably typhoid fever), which is accompanied by psychic and convulsive disorders… During the convalescence, which is slow and difficult, the King shows himself bizarre, fantastic, agitated and he madly undertakes this expedition to Brittany, which was to be interrupted so miserably, almost at its beginning, by the furious crisis of the forest of Le Mans.
Dupré’s portrait of Charles is of a frustrated youth, not too bright but spoiled, his personality out of step with his actions. Dupré also gives a nod to typhoid, specifically the acute fever that went with it as a possible contributory factor to Charles’s mental imbalance. Charles was on ‘constitutionally insecure ground’, as Dupré put it, but something had to have triggered the delusion. Capgras had considered the same disease significant in ‘Madame M’s case, and de Clérambault noted episodes of diphtheria and jaundice with interest in ‘Léa-Anna B’s history (see Chapter X). It’s after this protracted fever that the rudderless young Charles starts to exhibit ‘bizarre’ and ‘fantastic’ behaviour.
In the nineteenth century, the Anglican priest and scholar Sabine Baring-Gould wrote an eccentric but scholarly history of the phenomenon of werewolves and the associated mythology and folklore and reports a link to typhoid fever. In it he set out the ‘natural causes’ of the delusion of ‘lycanthropy’, where a person believes that they have taken the body of a wolf. He connects typhoid to delusional states asserting that a victim of typhoid fever ‘may regard his members as composed of [such] foreign and often fragile materials as glass’. Rheumatism and gout can apparently produce similar hallucinations, he says.20 Today, it is common for patients in intensive care to experience delusional hallucinations brought about by a combination of physical trauma, drugs taken while in hospital and fever which produces a belief that the body has been transformed into something inhuman. Paranoia is also common. A disease like typhoid could well have contributed to Charles’s instability and predisposed him to delusion.
Charles reigned for forty-two years, and continued to experience episodes of psychosis and delusions, that were not limited to glass, earning him that name of ‘Charles the Mad’. He did have long, intermittent periods of mental stability, however, and even managed to retain some power after defeat in the war by marrying his daughter to the victor, Henry V of England. Over the years he sought remedies for his illness, in the form of exorcism, and trepanning: the drilling of small holes in his skull. But Charles VI died in Paris 1422 at the age of fifty-three, without finding a cure for his mental turmoil.
It’s clear there were many factors which could have led to Charles’s mental crisis, genetic predisposition, traumatic events, fever among them. The picture is incomplete. The image of Charles with his backside wrapped in blankets is the icon of the golden age of Glass Men which followed. Cases then disappear almost completely from the records.
Modern research has turned up a few recurrences. The French translator Raymond Foulché-Delbosc reports a Glass Man in a Paris asylum in 1892.21 Then a lecture of 1883 from the archives in an Edinburgh mental hospital yields a case which is significant because it suggests that glass delusion was something experienced by women, too.
It was the American philosopher and psychologist William James who turned up the case. He came across Dr Clouston’s ‘Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease’ at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, the institution Clouston ran, and wrote up the lectures up in The Principles of Psychology in 1890. In the third lecture of the series, Clouston lists the symptoms of ‘about a hundred female melancholy patients’. James takes a moment to point out that delusions must be distinguished from illusions and hallucinations, writing: ‘A delusion is a false opinion about a matter of fact, which need not necessarily involve, although it often does involve, false perceptions of sensible things.’ Then he’s back to the job in hand, listing the wide variety of delusions that the women presented to Dr Clouston with, which included: ‘general persecution’, ‘having no stomach’, ‘being followed by the police’, ‘the soul being lost’, ‘that the head is severed from the body’, ‘unseen agencies working’, ‘having neither stomach nor brains’, ‘her children being killed’, ‘being a fish’, ‘being dead’ and ‘the legs being made of glass’.22
Glass delusion had not disappeared at all. It had simply gone underground.
A few more cases of glass delusion pop up in modern medical literature. In 1944, the French psychologist C. Pottier cited the case of a woman who thought that her chest and right shoulder were made of glass, and that she had heard the bones of her face cracking.23
Yet another case is found in an aside within an article profiling a Turkish-Greek military engagement during the First World War. An anonymous byline in Time magazine of 3 February 1958 referenced Atatürk’s successful offensive. The report went on to explain the Turkish victory not in terms of their superiority but in relation to the Greek general’s belief ‘that his legs were made of glass and would break if he stood up moved about too freely’.24
There’s a mention of glass delusion in passing from the essayist Erich Heller in 1958, who drops in by the by that he ‘once heard a strange case of mental affliction. A distinguished writer at breakfast one morning refused to sit down, protesting that an important part of his body was made of glass and was bound to break on impact with the chair. On another day, though, his nurse found him comfortably seated in a chair. “You’re cured!” she cried. “I knew it would happen! Such an intelligent man…” “Cured?” he replied. “Of what? Perhaps of a slight misapprehension. Why did nobody ever tell me that it is unbreakable glass?”’ Heller then adds a bit of gossip about what happened in the aftermath of this exchange: ‘He was rightly released as being perfectly adjusted to life, but unfortunately among those who knew him there lingered a slight doubt which even affected their reactions to his distinguished books.’25
The history of glass delusion is fragmented; a trail of anecdotes. Psychiatrist Andy Lameijn’s research in the 1990s led him to an encounter with a patient who was experiencing a glass delusion first-hand. Lameijn’s account offers rare access to a personal conversation about the delusion and compelling detail about what it’s like to experience.
Lameijn was director of the Endegeest Psychiatric Hospital in Leiden in the Netherlands when a fellow psychiatrist approached him. Years earlier, Lameijn had written and lectured on the subject of historic ‘glass delusion’ as a medical curio and his colleague thought he might be interested. Lameijn was aware of the story of the Mad King of France and the phenomenon of the Glass Men, but the case in point was one of glass delusion from the 1930s in the archives of another Dutch hospital. A woman had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital believing that her legs and back were made of glass. Such was her fear of personal contact, the notes showed, that the nurses couldn’t get near her to change her clothes or help her. She apparently recovered following treatment. A few months later, another doctor brought Lameijn a case from a different hospital from 1964, and shortly after that a young man turned up at the University Clinic in Leiden, claiming to be made of glass. ‘I really dropped everything,’ Lameijn recalls, ‘I didn’t want to miss this.’ He was going to have the opportunity to speak to someone, apparently the first in decades, who was experiencing glass delusion.
Lameijn talked for several hours to the man. He asked him what this feeling of being made of glass meant to him. Not wanting to distort the conversation, he didn’t bring up ideas of fragility or transparency. Initially reticent, the patient then began to open up. He pointed to the window in the consulting room and asked Lameijn what he could see. Lameijn replied that he could see a street, some cars, more buildings, people walking past, and waited.
The patient said: ‘Ah! You’ve missed the glass in the window. You didn’t see it. But it is there.’ He leaned forward, and said: ‘That’s me. I’m there, and I’m not there. Like the glass in the window.’
The conversation continued, and the patient expanded a little on his feelings about being made of glass, claiming that he was able to turn this feeling of being ‘there’ and ‘not there’ on and off at will; as if he had a switch in his own mind he could ‘disappear’ and ‘reappear’.
It transpired that the patient had recently been in a bad accident, and Lameijn began to formulate a theory as to why in this day and age a person might present with glass delusion. Glass was not a new invention. He concluded that the man in question was using his delusion as a sort of distance regulator. Following the accident, his family had become overprotective, and the glass delusion was his attempt to regain privacy and hide from his overbearing family.
Again, identity is unstable, faces familiar and unfamiliar, like ‘Madame M’s doubles. Here’s another person withdrawing from the world via their delusion, just as Spira, and, for different reasons, Charles VI did. There are echoes of ‘Madame X’, a woman whose bedside we’ll visit in Chapter IX who is convinced she has been dead for some time.
Why is glass delusion so persistent? What has kept people returning to it? There is good reason why someone experiencing mental disturbance in early modern Europe might adopt glass for a delusion. Here was a hard yet transparent material created by heating rock: beautiful, magical, breakable. The relative newness of clear glass as a material in seventeenth-century Europe explains how it caught the eye.
New technology features again and again in delusions all the way through. It comes to dominate the delusions of the 1950s and 1960s. As news of ingenious Cold War spying devices broke round the world, US doctors saw a spike in cases of people asking for help because the CIA had inserted a chip into one of their teeth and were using it to download their thoughts. But glass was no longer new by the time Andy Lameijn met his patient in Leiden.
More awkward questions remain. Why is it glass that appears in delusions related to technology, and not the steam train? The guillotine and not the printing press? Certain new technologies are more obviously disconcerting to encounter for the first time. We can see how the appearance of glass might disturb someone who views it as alchemy. The guillotine would chill anyone’s blood at first viewing.
But the persistent tropes like glass offer something that outlives their newness. Glass has many qualities, referencing religion and mysticism as well as technology. A person can easily map their own complexity onto glass, synthesising themselves with it. Glass can package up complicated and conflicted personalities in a single, tangible image for all the world to see. It is both precious and breakable just as the guillotine is a symbol of human ingenuity, and also of the knife-edge of life and death. Glass can take on all the many influences that come together to create mental confusion and make sense of them, even make something magical out of them.
The psychological dimensions to glass delusion are complex. The Glass Men frequently believed that they were being persecuted, and show a hypervigilance that looks a lot like paranoia. Rodaja in Cervantes’s tale fears persecution in his extra fragile state and sleeps in haylofts, wearing loose clothing and avoiding the locals who throw stones at him. ‘He walked always in the middle of the street lest some tile fall upon him…and during the winter, buried himself in straw. When his friends embrace him to prove he won’t break, he falls into a four-hour faint.’ There are echoes here of James Tilly Matthews running from the Air Loom Gang and of ‘Madame M’ evading the doubles who want to poison her. Glass is a natural communicator of paranoia. A person made of glass can be seen into, and ‘read’. But with a glass delusion there is a contrary sense that the glass person is inviting the observer in and that it’s not a violation so much as a request. Transforming into glass doesn’t solve everything by itself, of course. There are demands attached to a glass delusion, most urgently how the person with the delusion must be treated – with careful attention, care, respect. It’s never clear if the demands will be met. The signs are that in most cases they won’t be.
Glass is still resonant. Anxieties about fragility, transparency and personal space are more pertinent now to many people’s experience of living than they’ve ever been. It’s an elegant response to the society we have to navigate; a society that is increasingly crowded, in which modern technological advances isolate us but also offer apparently boundary-less communication. Glass delusion expresses social anxiety, which many of us experience to a lesser extent. It allows us to demand protection against drops and shocks, and transforms a lost soul like Charles VI into something worth treasuring and nurturing.