Louis Capet Being Welcomed to Hades, Villeneuve, c.1793.
CHAPTER VII
1793, the Marais, 3rd arrondissement, Paris, three miles north and over the river from the catacombs, a mile from the Prefecture of Police on the Île de la Cité, and just over a mile south-east of the Hôtel de Biéville, a celebrated clockmaker is at work in his studio. This workshop is one of many in the crowded street dedicated to ‘horologe’: the art and science of watches and clocks. Today, though, he is not working on a decorative clock or a watch, but something else, something groundbreaking. Shouts from a revolutionary mob in the street don’t distract him and he concentrates on what’s in front of him. Watch wheels and copper and steel plates lie scattered along the bench. He adds to the intricate construction of moving parts, adjusts something, measures, tests. This is a prototype. A prototype of a device, still hypothetical, that will work for ever without an outside energy source. He hasn’t slept much for weeks but he’s still going.
The ‘Marais’ refers to the marshland on which the district was built. The area has come up in the world and now it’s the choice for aristocrats, with its rue du Temple serving as the main artery up to the Temple complex itself. The ‘Temple’ of the religious order of Knights Templar who founded a fortress here. King Louis XVI was held at the Temple until his recent execution, on 21 January 1793. (It was Louis XVI who survived an attempted regicide a few years previously, just before Margaret Nicholson’s assault on George III with the butter knife.) It was from here, in fact, that Louis and his entourage left to travel to ‘the machine’ in the Place de la Révolution. The clockmaker heard the procession. Back to work.
Louis XVI’s patronage has seen the golden age of French watch and clockmaking, and an increase in clock production, as well as all manner of associated mechanical discoveries. The manufacture of objects that record the time has evolved into a complex science, and art. There’s a demand for ever more accurate timekeeping, particularly for maritime and astronomical use. This clockmaker has skilfully adopted the technology of the pendulum and the spiral balance spring, items invented in the seventeenth century by a Dutchman named Christian Huygens (curiously enough, this was the father of the poet Constantijn Huygens, author of A Costly Folly, which satirised ‘glass delusion’ by depicting a subject so terrified of smashing himself that he took to his bed).
Decorative clocks made in the Marais are known for their fashionable ornamentation, inspired by recent classical excavations, such as the lyre or urn. Glass-encased sculptures referencing Greek or Roman mythology are another speciality. The scientific clocks proudly show off their mechanical craftsmanship, boasting a new precision and even portability, in plainer designs. Many specialisms are involved in putting these timepieces together. French clockmakers are governed by the guilds who require them to employ independent craftsmen for each element − cabinetmakers, for example; stonemasons, or guilders − although the clockmaker retains control of the final product. Our clockmaker has built clocks to order for the wealthy of Paris, some of whom have recently been arrested, so he hears. He wonders if they will share the awful fate of the king. Back to work, back to work.
Our clockmaker has kept abreast of the recent scientific discoveries. He rubbernecked at demonstrations of the same unseen forces that captivated James Tilly Matthews. (Matthews is currently imprisoned in the Hôtel de Biéville across the city in the 9th arrondissement, the Air Loom just beginning to take shape in his imagination.) As a young man, our clockmaker heard people talk about Mesmer’s apartments and the marvels of animal magnetism. The perpetual motion machine facing him is a natural extension of his expertise. Like a clock it also deals in time, but if he can make it work, it will have the upper hand over time’s constraints. The concept of perpetual motion brings to mind astrological cycles and orbits and the horoscopes and futurology connected to them. The mechanics of the guillotine have shown how easy death can be. There is a kind of futureproofing in his endeavour, reminiscent of Burton’s endless revisions of his Anatomy.
People have been trying to create a perpetual motion machine since medieval times, and the clockmaker has been infatuated with the idea since childhood. ‘Cox’s timepiece’ inspired many young minds. It was developed in the 1760s by British jeweller James Cox, alongside John Joseph Merlin. Cox was a Walloon from Liège, a Freemason and inventor working in London. Their invention harnessed atmospheric pressure, via a mercury barometer, to keep the mainspring coiled, and brought to market a clock that didn’t require winding. ‘Cox’s Timepiece’ turns out not to be an example of true perpetual motion, however. In 1775 the Académie des Sciences in Paris declared the idea impossible and said in a statement that it would ‘no longer accept or deal with proposals’ after a steady stream of attempts that came to nothing.
The exhausted clockmaker has not given up, though. Not at all. As he continues to tinker with the calibration of his prototype he begins thinking again about the workings of that other new device he caught sight of recently through the crowds. The ‘louisette’, named after Dr Louis who helped bring it into service, the machine that will soon be known as the ‘guillotine’. This machine is never mass-produced and, just like the finest clocks, requires a whole team of carpenters, metalworkers and blacksmiths to construct. To calculate the rate of the fall, the weight of the steel blade was measured against the ‘mouton’, the metal weight attached to it. That would tell you the speed of the decapitation. Our clockmaker didn’t see the blade fall in the Place de la Révolution because of the throng, but he saw the blood meander across the cobbles around people’s feet. He also saw the leather basket waiting for the head. He’s back to work on his motion. But then he stops to really think about the workings of this other machine. He is confused, disorientated. He doesn’t feel like himself. Suddenly, he understands.
*
In September 1793, at the height of the revolutionary Terror, Philippe Pinel, aged forty-four, took up his post at Bicêtre asylum and set to work categorising the ‘known occasional causes’ of the two hundred patients in his care. The principal categories were: Domestic; Misfortune; Love; Religion or Fanaticism and Events connected to the Revolution.1
It was during this time that Pinel came across a number of patients with a belief about themselves which was so fanciful and yet so graphically macabre that it demanded special attention. Their heads, they said, had been cut off by the guillotine.
One such case at Bicêtre which struck Pinel as particularly interesting was that of a certain clockmaker from Paris. The man was obsessed with the idea of perpetual motion. Pinel theorised that this enthusiasm was related to the ‘influence of revolutionary disturbances’. These disturbances had made their way into his mind and now ‘his imagination was greatly heated, his sleep was interrupted, and, at length, a complete derangement of the understanding took place’. His family had sent him to Hôtel Dieu, and he was then transferred to Bicêtre.
Pinel outlines the details of his patient’s primary delusion:
His loss of reason was marked by a most striking feature: he fancied that he had lost his head on the scaffold, that it had been thrown indiscriminately among the heads of many other victims, that…the judges having repented of the cruel sentence, had ordered those heads to be restored to their respective owners and placed upon their respective shoulders, but that, in consequence of an unfortunate mistake, the gentleman who had the management of that business had placed upon his shoulders the head of one of his companions in misfortune. The idea of this change of head occupied his thoughts night and day, which determined his relations to send him to Hotel Dieu.2
After listing to him speak, Pinel swiftly came to the conclusion that the clockmaker’s delusion and others in a similar vein were a reaction to trauma. Pinel’s decision to devote himself to this new discipline of psychiatry, and to what he called ‘moral treatment’, was whispered to have been inspired by the death of a friend in 1783 ‘who went insane through excessive love of glory’ and died because ‘all pharmaceutic remedies’ failed to save him.3 The baffling suicide drove him to his vocation, they said. He was interested in the origins of a seemingly mysterious imbalance.
Certainly, the guillotine would have traumatised anyone in or around Paris at the time of the Terror. Its development was a process of trial and error. On 17 April 1792, a herd of sheep were decapitated at Bicêtre by a brand new ‘execution machine’. Pinel watched the practice runs. He then watched trials of the machine on human corpses. In fact he knew its inventor personally, as they were both involved in the debate over the soundness of ideas around ‘animal magnetism’ around the same time.4 The mechanised blade severed approximately three thousand heads between March 1793 and August 1794 and inevitably the technology of the guillotine infiltrated the public imagination. Even if a person escaped its action, it made death so close you could taste it and the escape hard to believe in. In 1793 an unknown artist published a satirical engraving entitled ‘Louis Arrives in Hades’, which shows the French king and his court arriving in the Underworld after their executions. They are carrying on as normal, bowing, laughing, chatting and seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are carrying their own severed heads in their hands.
Pinel describes the clockmaker’s behaviour on an ordinary day:
Nothing could equal his outrageousness and noisy bursts of jovial humour. He sang, shouted, and danced. And since his maniacal insanity entailed no act of violence he was allowed to go about the hospital freely in order to expend his tumultuous effervescence. ‘Look at these teeth’ he would cry ‘mine were exceedingly handsome, but these are rotten. My mouth was healthy, this one is diseased. What a difference between this hair and mine before my head was changed.’
This is a scene from a drunken burlesque. Inside the world of his delusion, however, the clockmaker’s concerns are perfectly logical. He has the wrong head so he has someone else’s teeth. No wonder it would occupy his thoughts and require urgent attention. Pinel is not jumping in with restraints or attempted cures. He is indulging him, trying to understand.
Hailing from provincial Languedoc, Pinel studied at medical schools in Toulouse and Montpelier, and then went to Paris where he was professionally overlooked as something of an outsider. Pinel failed to get one of the grants going for poor students at the Faculty of Medicine and instead took a job at one of the private medical institutions which were springing up to take in the swelling numbers of mentally ill. He spent many years slogging away in these low-profile sanitoria, away from the high offices of national medical institutions. It looked as though his career would be stymied by his ‘lack of fortune’.5
Pinel’s nephew said that his uncle suffered from a chronic stammer that turned public speaking into a daily battle. He never overcame it and was consequently quietly spoken, even withdrawn in company. Since this nephew was by all accounts devoted to him and had no apparent motive to denigrate him, this detail goes some way to humanising the legendary Father of Psychiatry, as he became. Here’s a man who found public speaking arduous and stumbled when he did talk.
On 16 March 1790, a law was passed which banned arbitrary internment of ‘lunatics’ based on just a single letter ordering it, and meant that they had to be seen and assessed by a doctor. This change was what got the Marquis de Sade out of Charenton, another Paris asylum, after his first incarceration there. The earthquake of the Revolution had shaken the impenetrable walls of the medical establishment and its hierarchies, and for the first time a person like Pinel could get in through the cracks. The profession’s old guard had lost influence and several of Pinel’s friends were now advising the new government. Pinel saw his opportunity, and his pioneering spirit took him quickly to the top at Bicêtre. There he formulated his thinking about delusions as phenomena related to human sensitivity, whose causes were to be found in ordinary life.
Bicêtre was developed as a hospital on the site of an old monastery just south of Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century on the instructions of ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV. The Marquis de Sade was in residence for three years before he was carted off to Charenton, and, like Bedlam in London, it doubled for decades as a prison, clearing the city’s beggars and prostitutes from the streets.
Bicêtre must have seemed something like a medieval vision of hell when Pinel arrived. The official history is that he set about encouraging freer conversations with patients that were designed to wander off-topic, and that he observed a strictly non-violent policy, banning bleeding and replacing it with careful listening and detailed note-taking. It was Pinel who set out to dismantle the link between mental illness and demonic possession. He grasped that a mental disturbance might have a physiological cause, but it could also be a product of social and psychological stresses and therefore required psychological, or ‘moral’, treatment as it came to be known.
If Pinel’s hunch was right about trauma and the clockmaker we can start to see how the delusion might operate, how it’s calibrated, and what it might offer him. It’s certainly given him a job to do. He must sort out the administrative error of the mixed-up heads and a kind of ‘normal life’ can resume. Getting his head and teeth back will keep him busy, and keep him out of the general confusion.
The clockmaker doesn’t remain so fanciful in his approach to life. He is violent, just as the ‘Napoleons’ who will arrive at Charenton asylum in a few years could be. He smashes up or otherwise destroys anything within his reach, making close confinement necessary.
Although his belief about his head doesn’t change, his behaviour does improve. The aggressive outbursts stop and he is allowed to walk freely again in the inner court at the hospital.
And then the other obsession returns. Something has been ticking away at the back of his mind. ‘The idea of the perpetual motion frequently recurred to him in the midst of his wanderings; and he chalked on all the doors and walls as he passed, the various designs by which his wondrous piece of mechanism was to be constructed.’ Pinel was gripped. He became more involved in the clockmaker’s daily life.
The cure, Pinel decided, was likely to come from encouraging his patient’s enthusiasm to finish the perpetual motion project. ‘His friends were, accordingly, requested to send him his tools, with materials to work upon, and other requisites, such as plates of copper and steel, watch weels, &c. The governor permitted him to set up a work bench in his apartment. His zeal was now redoubled. His whole attention was now riveted upon his favourite pursuit. He forgot his meals.’ There was a setback. ‘After about a month’s labour, which he sustained with a constancy that deserved better success, our artist began to think that he had followed a false route. He broke into a thousand fragments the piece of machinery which he had fabricated at so much expense of time, and thought, and labour; entered on the construction of another plan.’
He wasn’t beaten. Pinel observed him as he slaved away for another fortnight, putting all the parts back together. He got them working and, eventually, he ‘fancied that he saw a perfect harmony amongst them’. All eyes were on the machine and its creator. ‘The whole was now finally adjusted – his anxiety was indescribable – motion succeeded.’ It seemed as though he’d achieved the impossible. Could it be true? Pinel describes the scene of excitement: ‘It continued for some time – and he supposed it capable of continuing forever. He was elevated to the highest pitch of enjoyment and triumph, and ran as quick as lightning into the interior of the hospital, crying out like another Archimedes, “At length I have solved this famous problem, which has puzzled so many men famous for their wisdom and talents.”’
Success, vindication, elation. The world would be at his feet! We can only imagine the scenes at Bicêtre.
This great victory over the limitations of time and energy was short-lived: ‘grievous to say, he was disconcerted in the midst of his triumph. The wheels stopped! The perpetual motion ceased! His intoxication of joy was succeeded by disappointment and confusion. But, to avoid a humiliating and mortifying confession, he declared that he could easily remove the impediment, but tired of that kind of employment, that he was determined for the future to devote his whole time and attention to his business.’ The clockmaker didn’t accept defeat. He simply had more work to do on a specific area. It wasn’t that the machine could work, it was that it had to work. It was the carefully balanced mechanism of his mind keeping time over all the noise and chaos around him.
Now Pinel attempted an old-fashioned ‘ruse’. He would enter part way in the delusion in the hope of bringing his patient back with him to reality. He’d practised with something similar when he devised a fake trial and ‘pardoned’ one of the many patients who believed they were heading for the guillotine. This time, he co-opted another patient of a ‘gay and facetious humour’ to play a part. This patient was instructed to interview the clockmaker, and to bring the conversation around to the miracle of St Denis, who had famously carried his head around in his hands after it had been chopped off. The clockmaker confirmed that the scenario was feasible. The actor-patient laughed at this and ridiculed him: ‘A madman you are, for how could Saint Denis kiss his own head? With his heel?’6 Presented with that one simple, irrefutable fact of anatomy, the clockmaker ‘retired confused amidst the peals of laughter, which were provoked at his expense’, and he ‘never afterwards mentioned the exchange of his head’. Apparently, close attention to his trade for some months ‘completed the restoration of his intellect. He was sent to his family in perfect health; and has for more than five years now, pursued his business without experiencing a relapse.’
‘Pious frauds’ as they were sometimes called, or little white lies, to trick a person out of a delusion have been around since people first started trying to cure them. Reports of the easy success of a ruse are also found all the way back in Burton’s classical examples and are impossible to substantiate. Burton cites the melancholic from Siena who was scared to urinate in case he caused a biblical deluge, for example. In his case, a physician set a fire and the melancholic acted on impulse and put the fire out the quickest way he could by peeing on it. He was cured when a great flood didn’t ensue. It’s the same tactic used by the court doctor who started a fire to trick an unnamed royal out of his glass delusion, asking him why he hadn’t smashed when he banged on the door trying to get away from the flames?
Pinel’s use of the ruse at Bicêtre in the 1790s shows that some of his treatments were far from cutting edge. The counterpoint view on Pinel’s regime is most savagely represented by philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault in his 1961 essay ‘The Birth of the Asylum’ in Madness and Civilization. According to Foucault, medieval treatments were simply replaced by other subtler means of control. They may have been old methods, but Pinel saw that playing tricks on the delusional could be more successful at influencing a person’s thinking than authoritarian methods. Pinel wanted to cure delusions. This was new and ruses at Bicêtre were in the service of that objective.
In an editorial in the Gazette de santé before the Revolution he mentions a story which drew him to ruses as a way of speaking to an imaginative illness. This was a young priest who had playfully consulted both a fortune teller and a reader of horoscopes and been told by both he would die at twenty-five. In an echo of Robert Burton’s story, ‘after the double prediction his ‘exalted imagination’ caused the ‘most violent alarm in his soul’ and he became ‘withered and desiccated’. But when his twenty-fifth birthday came and went, he was completely cured.7 The date confronted him with reality and allowed him to resolve things for himself. The ethical problems with ruses, principally around the question of consent, were another issue and only appeared more and more obvious as the decades passed. A ruse may have cured the clockmaker, but a few old tricks were no match for the scale of the delusions inspired by the Revolution. They kept on coming.
The guillotine continued to appear in the delusional imagination of the French nation. There were cases of women at Salpêtrière admitted in the early 1800s who shared their fears of being guillotined. Pierre-Jean Laujon was the son of a famous popular songwriter, who fled the country when the revolutionary dramas began. Laujon had fought as a counter-revolutionary but was arrested at the Swiss border, taken to Paris and incarcerated, eventually at Charenton. An unnamed actress later went to Charenton to see a production of Molière’s Le Dépit amoureux staged by the Marquis de Sade, who had been in residence there since 1803. She remembered the scene as being ‘gaily performed’ by the ‘madman’, Laujon, playing the valet Mascarille, but the doctor’s report in the ledger at Charenton describes someone more obviously troubled: ‘He has the most bizarre ideas, he thinks that he has been beheaded and that his head is still in England, that someone has probably given him another in its place; to replace missing teeth, he constantly wears pieces of cork in his mouth.’8
There’s a memorable image of decapitation lodged in the mind of one of Charles Dickens’s characters in David Copperfield. Mr Dick is a wise fool, working obsessively on his own memorial but distracted by his other obsession with Charles I’s head. There is often the feeling that fictional characters with delusions are trying to communicate something uncomfortable about the world, something which the people around them don’t want to hear. They themselves, on the other hand, have found peace, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote further back in the previous century, happily tilting at windmills, believing that he’s a chivalric hero, while everyone laughs at him.
Trauma can produce delusions that are protective, like our clockmaker’s, or that are pitch-perfect metaphors for experiences. In the aftermath of the First World War, delusions caused by ‘shell shock’, or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, were common. In Mary Borden’s memoir of working as a field nurse in France during the Great War, The Forbidden Zone, she remembers: ‘My body rattled and jerked like a machine out of order. I was awake now, and I seemed to be breaking to pieces.’9 The belief that you had lost a limb when it was in fact still attached was reported in military hospitals across Europe.
The other side of our clockmaker’s delusion – the quest to achieve perpetual motion – also pops up again, with an interesting twentieth-century spin, in Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler’s spy novel of 1938 set in contemporary fascist Italy. Our expat fugitive hero has just lost his job as an armaments manufacturer and takes refuge in the mountains with a mathematical genius. The professor has fallen foul of Mussolini by refusing to sign a declaration that fascism is the ‘sacred religion’. What’s ruined him professionally, it turns out, is a swivel-eyed delusion regarding perpetual motion. The professor has become convinced that the laws of thermodynamics are based on a gigantic misconception and that ‘science was nothing but a house of cards’. ‘I knew for certain that he was insane,’ our hero concludes before he dashes off.
The suggestion, though, is that a false belief like this might be a perceptive response to a mad world. In 1960 the psychotherapist R. D. Laing will tell us about a little girl he met who said she had an unexploded atom bomb in her stomach and draw the same conclusion. It is easy to dismiss our crackpot inventor as an amusing anecdote. His beliefs were supposedly reversed with a simple trick. But we might consider the possibility that he had a tighter grasp on the true reality of the Terror than some others who stayed calm and composed as they got on with their lives.
Modern theories of thermodynamics proved perpetual motion to be impossible. We understand the clockmaker’s attempt to create a more reliable, and predictable, future, and what a crushing blow it must have been to have his machine fail. All the same, it’s hard to resist the idea that he might have had another go at it in a few years.