The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Author:Jennifer Cody Epstein [Epstein, Jennifer Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

In the days that followed, Josephine still wouldn’t speak to me, or even look at me when she could help it. She stared off into the distance as I did her hair and laced her new boots, responding to anything I said with a cryptic nod, head shake, or shrug. She did the same as I recounted to her every exercise and experiment the doctors put her through while she was “under.” Needless to say, I did so now with excruciating care, often including details of no possible significance (“Babinski smelled like a distillery,” “the Gnome went to the latrine twice,” “Freud had salad stuck between his front teeth”) to be certain I omitted nothing.

And yet these meticulous reconstructions did nothing to soften her stony disdain for me, or to ease her overall agitation. If anything, she seemed even more jumpy and anxious than she had before our La Samaritaine trip, starting at sudden noises and stiffening at the sound of male voices approaching inside the asylum corridors. She seemed particularly wary of Claude, freezing in place if she saw him coming and sometimes even making up excuses to go in the opposite direction. All of this made sense, given both what she’d confessed to me by the river and the brutal way the Basque had handled her in the feeding room. And yet her anxiety troubled me. Not just because she was so clearly terrified beyond her wits, but because I was sure she regretted having entrusted me with her confession—and perhaps even feared I’d betray her to the doctors myself. After all, I’d already betrayed her once.

And it was a betrayal. I saw that now. No matter how I tried to rationalize my actions to myself, the fact remained that she’d trusted me to protect her in the asylum, just as she’d trusted her mother to protect her at the judge’s. And like her mother, I’d thrown that trust in her face. It mattered little that she had no memory of having been “wed” to two strange men in front of (quite literally) a thousand eyes, or that there was little I could have done to prevent those faux unions from taking place. That I’d kept her in the dark about Charcot’s mariage à trois exercise was clearly as upsetting to her as the fact that it had happened at all, and that I hadn’t anticipated this was a painful source of regret.

Equally painful was her reaction after I went to her during one of her nightmares the night after our trip to La Samaritaine. When I awoke to her ragged shriek, Josephine was already bolt upright in her cot, staring at the shuttered window by her bed with the glazed eyes of someone trapped in a terrifying dream. “How?” I heard her whisper in the slurred speech of the sleep talker. “How is it possible? How is he with—that beast?”

Knowing better than to try to wake her, I instead attempted to gently ease her back onto her bed.

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