Damaged Literary Goods: Telling the Tale of Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France

Author(s): Leonard R. Koos

Source: Dalhousie French Studies , Fall 2007, Vol. 80 (Fall 2007), pp. 45-58
Published by: Dalhousie University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40838407

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Dalhousie University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Dalhousie French Studies

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Damaged Literary Goods: Telling the Tale of Syphilis
in Nineteenth-Century France
Leonard R. Koos

Till then I'll sweat, and seek about for eases

And at that time, bequeath you my diseases.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1603)
... je me suis dit que, tous les genres se trouvant
aujourd'hui exploités, usés, triturés, tous les sujets
littéraires étant déflorés, il n'en existait aucun qui tut plus
vierge que la SYPHILIS, (iv)
Auguste-Marseille Barthélémy, Syphilis, poème en trois
chants, préface (1848)
fi η Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1834), the description of Mademoiselle
/ Michonneau as pallid, skeletal and ravaged by time prompts the narrator to wonder
"Quel acide avait dépouillé cette créature de ses formes féminines? [...] était-ce le vice, le
chagrin, la cupidité? avait-elle trop aimé, avait-elle été marchande à la toilette, ou
seulement courtisane?" (33). ' Whereas the narrator only speculates, Vautrin provides a
trenchant insight into the woman's past by nicknaming her "Ninon cariée, Pampadour en
loques, Vénus de Père-Lachaise" (266). In the manuscript of Le Père Goriot, Balzac had
first named this character Mademoiselle Vérolleau, explicitly revealing in her name a
syphilitic past.2 This diagnosis of Mademoiselle Michonneau, coupled with the narrator's
mentioning of "l'amour parisien qu'on guérit à quelques pas" (24) from the Maison
Vauquer (a reference to the Hospice des Vénériens, established on the rue Saint-Jacques
in 1793), discloses the lower depths, tainted and contaminating, of the Balzacian
metropolis.3 Balzac's palimpsest of the image of syphilis, through its layering, magnifies
its subversive threat.

1 The second term in the series - the "marchande à la toilette" - is a reference whose implications have been
obscured with time. The female second-hand clothes seller was negatively associated with the worst sort of
mercantilist trade, predatorily taking advantage of those in financial distress in order to procure goods of a
certain quality. In Gabriel Pélin's Les Laideurs du beau Paris (1861), the "marchande à la toilette" is called
"une des calamités de la capitale, elle flétrit tout ce qu'elle touche... c'est une lèpre materielle et morale qui se
greffe sur l'envie et les aspirations de luxe des pauvrettes et même de la femme élégante par en haut" (132).
Paul Gavarni's 1862 engraving "Marchande à la Toilette" represents a haggard, grotesque, nearly deformed
creature wandering among the rubble of a Parisian street beyond the fortifications. Other nineteenth-century
sources associate the "marchande à la toilette" with the world of prostitution. Charles Virmaître's account of fin
de siècle Parisian prostitution Paris impur (1889) classes them with the "modistes" as well known go-betweens
in the procurement of prostitutes for male clients. In the anonymous, privately published directory of Paris' s
prostitutes The Pretty Women of Paris (1883), the author indicates that "[m]any old Parisian whores go into the
curiosity trade when their own curiosities are beginning to get worn out' (125) and details how one Emilie
Brache successfully moved from the world of prostitution to the "bric-a-brac trade" (26) in which prostitutes
and mistresses served as her buyers and sellers. All of these associations place the "marchande à a toilette" in
or near the underworld of urban prostitution and sexually link the terms of Vautrin's speculation on the
shadowy nature of Mademoiselle Michinneau's past.
2 Proper names in literature which depend on word play with the French "vérole" range from Monsieur Véroles
mentioned in Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1608) to the late-nineteenth century pseudonymous
writer Paul Vérola whose fictional works involving syphilis (notably, L'Infamant [1891] and the highly
allegorical poetry collection Les Baisers morts [ 18931) were popular reading in the 1890s
3 For more on the societal status of syphilitic infection in the late-eighteenth century and the eventual founding of
the Hospice des Vénériens as a part of revolutionary legislation, see Benabou.; Connor.

Dalhousie French Studies 80 (2007)

-45-

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
46 Leonard R. Koos

Gustave Flaubert's Mada

nineteenth century's litera
a day carnal of
pleasure
putrescent appearance fri
whose illness Homais ul
responding to his prescri
vieux castor défoncé" (340
this figure. The reader co
from the representational
irrelevant barometer, this
the descriptive exigencie
marginal "castor," not in
possibility arises. "Un vieu
Jérôme Fraçastor), the It
morbus gallicus presented
the mythical shepherd firs
the New World gods.4 T
symptoms associated w
incontrovertibly overdeter
surreptitiously deposits
excavated, resonates throu
Balzac and Flaubert, in t
exhibit their respective so
name it without naming it
order to conceal the immo
go all the way, but noneth
only to those able to dec
elaborate encryption, w
diagnostic representation,
in literature before the fin

In the Beginning
. . . Etre indéfinissab
Qui naquit, on ne s
Auguste-Marseille
chants

The image of syphilis h

relativity. Following its m

4 Portions of Fracastoro's poem

Barthélémy who, in turn, wrot
editions in the next eleven years
de Saint-Gervais glossing the m
looming behind all of these allusi
during his trip to the Orient. For
1850 letter to Louis Bouilhet, wri
5 For more on the blind beggar
Donaldson-Evans. Interestingly
serialized version of novel in L
Flaubert and the review's director
meaning and motivation to these
6 Another nineteenth-century tex
"Rappiccini's Daughter" (1844;
allegorical rather than encrypted
(157-83) and Bensick (93-1 12) to

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 47

syphilis was very often named after that national group associated w
As an expression of territorial or proto-nationalist rivalries and p
rendered by the English, the Germans and the Italians as the Fre
French as "le mal de Naples," and by the Dutch as the Spanish sick
as the Portuguese sickness, and so forth. Due to its initially
symptomology, syphilis was frequently confused in diagnosis and la
smallpox, tuberculosis, and arthritis. Moreover, in light of the qui
of its venereal origin, syphilis during this period was figurative
(because of the superficial resemblance of syphilitic skin lesions
smallpox), coppernose, fire piss (here conflated with gonorrhea), b
priapism, lues, Monseer Drybone; in French, "la grosse verolle,"
"la pancque denarre," ""le mauvais mal," "la brigandine," "la gaillardise," "la
mignonise," "la sorcellerie," "la diablerie," "les fiebres Sainct-Job" (equated with the
Biblical character's malady as described in chapter II of The Book of Job, in its name
implicitly attempting to reftite the New World theory of syphilis' origin), as well as many
other less common expressions.7
Fracastoro's neologism which gradually becomes the official medical term for the
disease by the eighteenth century does not escape the mercurial referential ity of the
malady's onomastic existence as many contend that the Italian poet's purported invention
was actually a deformation of the Latin "Sipylus," a name appearing in book VI of
Ovid's Metamorphoses as one of Niobe's slain sons (in book XXIV of Homer's Illiad,
the Greek equivalent, "Sipylos," refers to the mountain in Lydia on which Niobe was
transformed into a weeping block of marble). Others claim that Fracastoro's sheperd's
name derives from the Homeric Greek "sus," pig, and "phelein," to love, indicating the
result of an unnatural or morally repugnant love. Still others see in the name syphilis a
deformation of the Greek "sipalos," shameful. One is tempted to reiterate the exclamation
of Voltaire's Candide, uttered upon hearing the story of Pangloss's own syphilitic
infection, "Voilà une étrange généalogie!" (157).
Literature before the mid-eighteenth century did not shrink from naming or
representing the illness of syphilis. In Villon, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Donne, Voltaire,
Swift, and many others, representations of syphilis abound and circulate explicitly and
without excuses or moralizing mediations. Louis-Sébastien Mercier's version of syphilis
in his mammoth proto-journalistic description of the French capital Tableau de Paris
(1781-1788) provides a telling consideration of the shifting strategies for representing the
illness in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 604 discusses Bicêtre, the
infamous prison-hospital which had become associated with the treatment of syphilis.
Initially figuring Bicêtre as an "[ujlcère terrible sur le corps politique" and a "trop grande
lèpre" (243) of the French capital, Mercier maneuvers his discussion away from the
illness to one of the vices and immorality of its residents. Beyond the hyperbola of the
initial figuring, the disease itself is not mentioned again in the chapter. In the following
chapter, straightforwardly entitled "De la guérison des maladies vénériennes," Mercier
moves from the literal designation of the "virus vénérien" to the far more figurative and
foreboding evocations of the "troupeau gangrené" infected by "le cruel et invisible
vautour qui ne cesse de les ronger" (355), "le mal," "la honteuse maladie" (257), the
"fléau rongeur," and "ce poison inconnu" (258). Even in the Marquis de Sade's sexually
explicit La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), in the sixth dialogue where Dolmancé

7 For more on the ever-changing name of syphilis, see Quetel (9-16); Bentley; Cummins; Le Pileur; Dorveaux.
Fracastoro, in his poem proposing both the New World and astrological theories for the disease's origin,
attempts to explain this onomastic relativity: "Quam tarnen (aeternum quoniam dilabitur aevum)/ Non semel in
terris visam, sed saepe fuisse, /Ducendum est, quamquam vestustas/Cuncta situ involens, et res, et nomina
delet..." (60). Elsewhere in the poem, before the definitive naming of the disease after the mythical sheperd in
book III, the disease is more literally called "morbus," "contagium," "lues" and "pernecies."

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 48 Leonard R. Koos

instructs the valet Lapie

alternately rendered "cet
qu'on ait encore vues da
eighteenth-century repre
away from literality and a
a clandestine imaging of
coming decades.
By the second half of t
reçues's (c. 1880) wry co
(552), and despite the ma
only furtively reemerges
d'Aurevilly's "La Vengea
Maupassant's "Le Lit 29"
is dilatorily acknowledge
challenge for the writer of

Textually Transmitted

La syphilis ne désa
victimes; elle pour
(14)
Dr. Solari, La Syphilis au double point de vue individuel et
social (1899)
Barbey's "La Vengeance d'une femme" and Maupassant's "Le Lit 29" signal a transition
in the textual etiology of the figure of syphilis in nineteenth-century French literature.
Syphilitic infection, ultimately central to each story's plot, becomes progressively
extricated from a poetics of the illicit and emerges onto the discursive landscape as an
elusive figure adaptable to a wide range of narrative desires. Barbey, continuing in the
contemporary practice of not naming the disease, on the final page of his tale, has the
narrative go-between Tressignies learn after the fact, that the Duchess of Sierra Leone,
while working as a cheap Parisian streetwalker as part of her plot of revenge against her
aristocratic husband, had contracted "la plus effroyable des maladies" (336). Syphilis, the
Duchess's inevitable return on her investment in infamy, which Corbin considers
symbolic of her "autodestruction par la sexualité" (370), results in graphically corporeal
symptoms, recalling the disease's initial literary and pictorial images in the late-fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, that insist on a culmination in decomposition and defiguration:
"elle s'était cariée jusqu'aux os" (336). 10 As the Duchess's body loses its contours, its

8 Zedlin contends that between 1840 and 1875, 180 books were published exclusively on syphilis, not to mention
countless others in which the disease was discussed in some fashion. (867). The vast majority of these works
would be classified as medical studies and advice literature. Still, one notes a discursive tendancy in many of
these works, much like in Mercier' s chapter, that literally names the disease then moves to commonly
circulating figures like "poison" or "venin."
9 The reality of the pandemic nature of syphilis in France is perhaps nowhere more dramatically expressed than in
Guy de Maupassant's 2 March 1877 letter to Robert Pinchon wherein the author, after receiving the diagnosis
from his doctor, rejoices "I've got the pox! At last! The real thing! Not the contemptible clap, not the
ecclesiastical crystalline, not the bourgeois coxcombs or the leguminous cauliflowers - no - no, the one which
Francis I died of. The majestic pox, pure and simple; the elegant syphilis... I've got the pox... and I am proud
of it by thunder, and to hell with the bourgeoisie. Hallelujah, I've got the pox , so I don't have to worry about
catching it any more... (qtd. in Quétel 128-30). For a discussion of the possible relationship between
Maupassant's syphilis and his literary production, particularly with regards to the fantastic in his later works,
see Voivenel.
10 Variations on the French word "carie" are often employed when figuring syphilis in nineteenth-century French
literature. It is generally agreed upon that the epidemic appearance of syphilis in the late-fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries produced symptoms of such virulence that included a corporeal dissolution (particularly of

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 49

functions, and its essence in the disease's progression, the fig

evoked, threatens to exceed all corporeal limits and circulate indep
of the victim.
A similar representational predicament is at the heart of Mau
when the disease first appears in the narrative as a result of the cap
after the health of his pre-Franco-Prussian war mistress, Irma. N
difficulty he encountered in obtaining permission to visit his erst
ushered without commentary or explanation through the hospital
ward is reached. The disease's name, which no character in the stor
a sign designating the ward, "Syphilitiques." This word, used twic
the omniscient, third-person narrator, in its merging of the dis
bearers, infuses the figure of syphilis with a dehumanizing potent
consumed, even in language, by the disease. Irma herself is unwilling
from which she suffers and, in response to Epivent' s incredu
replies: "Tu as bien vu, c'est écrit sur la porte" (181). In the syphili
"croyait sentir une odeur de pourriture, une odeur de chair gâtée
dortoir plein de filles atteintes du mal ignoble et terrible" (181), Ir
like the other similarly stricken patients, to an amorphous m
recognize her; she is identifiable only by the number of her bed. T
identifying the syphilitic patient - also an element in "La Ven
wherein Tressignies asks the hospital chaplain about "le numér
seem to underline the medically rhetorical attempt, reinforced b
hospital, to codify, hence contain, the disease in the discursive
stories, with regard to the medical treatment of syphilis, stand at
distinction Foucault makes between the hospital and the clinic, th
where "il n'est question que 'd'exemple' le malade est l'accident
transitoire dont elle s'est emparée" (59). Neither the origin of Irm
been raped by the invading Prussian soldiers) nor its subsequ
substitutes the discourse of nationalism for a medical one (having
order to use her illness as a patriotic weapon against the enemy)
from the horror of decomposition that the figure of syphilis ceasele
In both stories, although in quite different ways, syphilis and a w
inextricably linked as fundamental factors in narrative progress. In b
of the story of syphilis embodies a narrative event that resists contr
ultimately supplants other social narratives (those of genealogy, g
honor, tradition, and so forth). As the story of syphilis surfaces,
interrupted by a pathologizing effect on textuality. In "La Venge
Tressignies' s transformation into a potential narrator, as Bernheime
Duchess's "narrative availability to him alone" (333), carries with i
of closure, suggested by her death, but also problematized by the
perhaps having infected any number of her clients including Tre
unresolved issue of closure at the story's ending, which opposes Tr
narrative control over the Duchess' story, and the inevitable circulati

the face and the nose), not unlike leprosy. For more on the literary representations of
see Rosebury (107-132). By the nineteenth century, however, such symptoms were rar
in the ensuing centuries, at least partially domesticated the disease's symptomolo
nineteenth-century literature and art continued to figure the disease as leading to a h
the body. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this sort of figur
increasingly rare and, in both medical commentary and literary representation, skin
of the mind in syphilitic insanity (referring respectively to the first and last stages of sy
be emphasized. For an excruiatingly detailed example of the latter, see Edmond de G
for 1870 while his brother Jules was dying of a syphilitic infection (227-47).

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 50 Leonard R. Koos

infamy, generated by th
full in the text, indica
notorious hospital wher
containing the story of
Maupassant's story si
Epivent, after the nat
assailed with "une déch
stock of the regiment
conquest. His reputati
reproach that she kille
contention reduces Epiv
hero or as a Second Emp
In both Barbey and Ma
corporeal dissolution do
but signals its contami
reasoning taken by Em
Nana. While the offic
décomposait" (440) in te
of syphilis (particularly
Nana has become, in t
infection onto the bod
(440). n The demands of
diagnostic designation -
1870 - function as a r
preoccupation in imagin
emblematic commentar
image and in Barbey's
syphilis, the disease t
nineteenth-century sci
(156), however guarded,
the otherwise decisive g
morbid limits of its co
values in its wake.

Flowers of Evil

Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis

covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of
medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture. Over and above
all this floats the philosophy of disease which is a stern
dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing
flowers to the sick. (8 1 )

William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell (1920)

1 1 The representation in the nineteenth century of syphilis as a poison or venom was, in fact, commonplace.
Baudelaire's poem "A celle qui est trop gaie," one ofthose censured in the original edition oï Les Fleurs du
mal (1857), is perhaps the century's most noted example of this particular trope, which became literally
associated with the disease when published in Les Epaves in 1866 with an editorial note chastising the
magistrates for their "interprétation syphilitique" (1: 157) of the final stanzas (in fact, the authorities had
censored this poem without making specific reference beyond its potential offensiveness to public morals).
12 It is notable that in these three stories, the venereally infected subject is a woman. Gilman indicates that since
the mid-eighteenth century, "the individual bearing the signs and stigmata of syphilis becomes that of the
corrupt female" (254).

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 5 1

In the decade of the 1880s, despite Showalter's claim that in Fr

transgressive figure seemed to correspond to the privileged dec
maudit'" (91) syphilis in French literature remains a discursively elu
most part. While Sontag is perfectly correct in asserting that "there w
syphilis. But no mystery. Its causality was clear, and understood t
she compares it to tuberculosis, syphilis possesses an elusive figurai
due to the necessity or desire to maintain the secret of its venereal or
play Ghosts (1881; published in French in 1889), the nineteent
celebrated treatment of the disease, breaks little ground in demyst
buries its origin in the patriarchal past. While Mrs. Alving would se
fear of him being "poisoned by the unwholesome atmosphere of th
dissolute father, Osvald returns with the malady diagnosed. Init
medical condition as "not what's usually called ill" (72-3) and "th
(73), Osvald resorts to the words of his French doctor who "diagnos
had provided the infection, rendering the progeny "vermoulu" (74)
to translate the doctor's word "vermoulu" (worm-eaten), instead re
equally provocative image "[t]he sins of the father are visited on
evinces the shifting strategies, however extreme or perfunct
representing syphilis in a period when the reality of the disease
concern was asserting itself in the discursively negotiated European c
In another text from the same decade, Alexandre Hepp's L'Ep
Duperret seeks out a doctor as the novel begins. Confessing a checke
describing his symptoms, Henri tells a tale of a virtuous, pure chi
which had provided "un sang pur et intact" (22) that was irrevo
debauched Parisian lifestyle. He urges the doctor to tell him the unm
his illness, a plea that prompts the latter to encourage his patient to
with persistent treatment although "il mentait: le remède n'ex
descriptive insistence throughout this passage on blood as the m
unnamed disease had taken hold of its victim leaves little doubt as to the nature of the
infection. The final pages of the novel, which include the birth of Henri's monstrous
child and a hallucinatory battle in which the father murders the son in order to stop the
disease's generational progress ("II a tranché le mal, tari le poison" [297]) then dies
himself "les pieds sur ce sang maudit" (298), proposes a vision of syphilitic insanity in a
much more excessive and transgressive manner than the conclusion of Ibsen's play. Still,
Ibsen's Ghosts and Hepp's L'Epuisé, while not explicitly representing the disease, attest
to the discursive shift in its representation in the 1880s from the temporal immediacy of
an individual action to its transmission through the diachronic construct of heredity.
With the arrival of an organized decadent aesthetic in the 1880's, an entire range of
morally transgressive behavior - transvestism, homosexuality, sadism, incest, drug
addiction, and so forth - achieved more explicit expression in fin de siècle European
culture. The pages of decadent prose, however, feature much less prominently the
scandalous figure of syphilis. An occasional image often associated with prostitution (as
in Jean Lorrain's La Maison Philbert [1904]), a potential allegory (as in Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Grey [1891] or Lorrain's short story "La Vengeance d'un masque"
from Le Crime des riches [1905]), in isolated yet significant reference (as in Octave
Mirbeau's Les Vingt et un jours d'un neurasthénique [1901] and Jean Lorrain's
Monsieur de Phocas [1901]), syphilis is nowhere more conspicuous during this period
than in the post-naturalist, decadent works of Joris-Karl Huysmans. In En rade (1887)
and Là-bas (1891), syphilis appears under the various guises of an epiphenomenal
representational consideration, but in A rebours, Huysmans provides decadent prose's
most fully articulated image of the infection.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
52 Leonard R. Koos

The notably curious ob

n'est que syphilis" (197),
vague" (80) as well as his
speculative and oneiric t
horticultural analogy tha
lesions, Des Esseintes co
and imaginatively consi
human beings since th
naturalist construct of
chronological presuppo
monde, de pères en fil
l'éternelle maladie qu
contradictory image of
described as being sim
symptomatically manifes
syphilis "avait couru, s
version of syphilis, in c
advice literature's shift in
infection and post-mort
never degenerates or en
terminal ailments that t
and gout.15 From time
Esseintes), syphilis does
corporeal surfaces in les
graphical notation: "écla
Fépiderme, l'image de l'a

13 Flaubert's Homais also dia

nineteenth- century sources
produces in later generations s
literature, particularly as it re
Sigsworth and Wyke.
14 In the syphilis novels of th
development of the horticultu
a tropical tree or shrub whose
could prove fatal. The novel'
characterizes the city of Paris
mancenilles, continua l'interne
meurt moralement, dont on pe
differs sharply from Huysma
depopolationist fears and euge
collection of poems La Mon
particularly in the poem "Le
sang" (4). In the twenty-fourt
Hell (1920), the figuring of sy
more than a wild pink in the
the body with salmon-red pe
figure: "Thus, he says to him
language but rather indicate
contaminates each one of my w
15 While it is true in medical an
becomes 'disease,' seduction b
may not be conclusive enoug
explosion of advice literature a
the discursive treatment of sy
theoretical attention and rhet
who were infected through a c
nonetheless, instrumentalizes m

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 53

A rebours recalls Des Esseintes bedroom's decorating aesthetic wh

l'optique du théâtre dont les vils oripeaux jouent les tissus luxueu
use of the most expensive materials in order to simulate the impres
same fashion, this figurai transformation of syphilis renders it a
symbolic representation that oxymoronically simulates health in th
narrates an epidermal tale in which opposing values (health an
poverty, happiness and misery, truth and simulation) are rendered
the unresolved presence of dichotomized signifiers on and in the sy
In Des Esseintes's dream of syphilis emanating from the horticu
the disease, the dream world facilitates the figure's more com
movement across waking discursive categories. The entire dre
various guises of "la grande vérole," fluidly violates the normally
of space, time, gender, subjectivity, and language. Language, in part
account of the dream, proves to be remarkably deficient in fixin
image of syphilis: "il cherchait en vain son origine, son nom, sa
the dream, succeeding images alternately figure syphilis as a
androgyne, and the plant that bites Des Esseintes. Beyond the de
superficial details which serves to actively undermine the notion
coherence (as with the mysterious woman whose attire inclu
decontextualizing juxtapositions of a maid's apron, a tattered neck
boots, and a black bonnet topped with a rosette) syphilis persi
étrange figure [...] ambiguë, sans sexe" (199).16 Huysmans' oneiric
representational excess that challenges narrative and representat
anticipates the well-known passage of Là- bas wherein Durtal's ps
life of the heretic Gilles de Rais represents the latter' s hallu
sexualized landscape which becomes "une clinique vénérienne" (15
past through the disruptive lens of the contemporary péril vénérien
A rebours's rendering of syphilis, conceived of as either, b
Esseintes, a strange plant or a system of ironic epidermal writing o
Esseintes, as an indeterminate figure that consistently resists and d
and standardization, can be compared to the novel's conceptualiz
of a language, expressed as an issue of stylistics in the novel's th
vieille charogne" (127) of fifth-century Latin atrophies "dans tou
corps" (125). In the vitiating body of the Latin language, whose d
contains details that can be compared to ongoing diagonostic and
associate syphilis and corporeal decomposition, Des Esseintes sees
valorizes the creation, in the degenerating linguistic chaos of th

16 In Théophile Gautier's pornographic Lettre à la présidente (1850; published

textually transmits a figurai excess: "L'armée française tout entière est sur le
comme des obus, la chaude-pisse jallit en jets purulents et rivalise avec les fonta
rhagades et des crêtes-de-coq pendent, en franges pourprées, au derrière des
fondements; les tibias s'exfolient en exostoses, comme des colonnes de vert antique
des constellations pustuleuses étoilent les deltóides de l'Etat-Major; et l'on voit se
lieutenants tachetés et mouchetés, comme des panthères, par des roséoles, des ép
de café, des excroissances verruqueses, des fies cornés et cryptogamiques, et autres
tertiäres, qui paraissent ici au bout de quinze jours" (72-73). A related representatio
in Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas (1901) in which the narrator visits a syph
ultimately inverts the traditional representation of disease by describing the eyes of
possessing "l'expression d'infine lassitude et d'extase enivrée" (96) of ancient Greek
17 Durtal's description of Gilles de Rais's venerealized landscape leaves little
vénérienne" refers to syphilis. Durtal's biographical version of the baron, non
preoccupation with the contemporary "péril vénérien" as Gilles de Rais lived in the
century (serving under Charles VII) while syphilis first appears in 1494 during Cha
and siege of Naples, missing the heretic by some fifty years.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 54 Leonard R. Koos

being assailed by barbar

style, which inscribes
organic analogy, include
appropriations from the
turns, signal not so mu
coherence. Like the figu
dreaming, the decadent l
analogue in writers like B
their conventional usa
decomposition and novelt
of contemporary convent
Literary Treatments
L'ingénieux flé
Assigne à chaqu
(13)
Auguste-Marseille Barthélémy, Syphilis, poème
en trois chants

In the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, literary representations of
syphilis seem to echo Baudelaire's wry remark in a note in his unfinished work on
Belgium regarding the revolution of 1848, "nous avons tous l'espirit républicain dans les
veines, comme la vérole dans les os. Nous sommes Démocratisés et Syphilises" (2:961).19
The hitherto muted representational terror surrounding syphilis is succeeded in they?« de
siècle by the explicit articulation of the disease's image in clinically regulated narrative
that seeks to treat in every sense of the word, the features, real or imagined, of the 'péril
vénérien.' The hyperbolic, protean figuration of syphilis becomes tempered with an
addendum that offers a rhetorical containment of the disease: the representation of its
treatment. In a host of turn-of-the-century syphilis narratives - the pseudonymous Paul
Vérola's L'Infamant (1891), André Couvreur's Les Mancenilles (1900), Charles-Louis
Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse (1901), Michel Corday's Vénus (1901, later retitled
Vénus ou les deux risques), Victor Margueritte's Prostituée (1901), Eugène Brieux's
drama Les Avariés (1901) - as well as in other texts which tangentially represent syphilis

18 Huysmans's association of syphilis and decadence implies a liberation, as much societal as it is literary. This
particular vision had been anticipated by those passages of Ibsen's Ghosts wherein Mr. AJving's "dissolute"
existence is implicitly connected to his intellectual readings which have influenced his wife's thinking, works
that the Pastor Manders deems "these terrible, subversive, free-thinking books!" (61). In early modernist
poetry, the most significant conjoining of syphilis and creative activity is the figure of Jeanne, the syphilitic
muse of Blaise Cendrars's Prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France (1913). The presence and
inspiration of the adolescent prostitute, however, alternately promotes a profusion of fragmentation and
repetition, both of which are, nonetheless, in Cendrars's quasi-futurist modernism, authentic responses of
poetry to the modern world. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1948), the main character Adrien Leverkühn,
styled on Nietzsche, contracts the disease from the entomologized prostitute, "Hataera esmeralda." Mann's
version of syphilitic infection, while referencing to late nineteenth-century degeneration theory, ultimately
provides a modernist revision ofthat pejoratively conceived equation by suggesting that Leverkühn' s syphilis
provides the necessary catalyst for the expression of his revolutionary genius.
19 The play on words between civilization and syphilis (later syphihzation) became quite popular by the 189Ü s,
particularly as a criticism of the French military in the colonies. Pierre Loti's nouvella Les Trois dames de la
Kasbah, published in Fleurs d'ennui (conte oriental) (1882), anticipates this type of rhetoric. In that work,
three sailors contract "une maladie horrible" and bring back to France the "contagion arabe" (89) which
compromises the health of the next generation of the sailors' families. It is also during the fin de siècle that the
association of syphilis and civilization was proposed by the increasingly vocal commentary of the extreme
Right, often as a criticism of Third Republic politics. The same trope was developed and disseminated in
ultra-rightist and fascist rhetoric, notably Edmond Drumont {Le Testament d'un antisémite [1891] ), Vacher
Lapouge ("Dies ires - la fin du monde civilisé" [published in the review Europe in 1923] ), and Adolph Hitler
(Mein Kampf [1925] ), all of whom associate syphilis and Jews in a virulent anti-Semitic discourse.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 55

like Léon Daudet's medical fantasy Les Morticoles (1894) and P

gonorrhea L 'Insexuée (1904), however horrifying the initial image
is textually inhibited by the enactment of a medically negotiated di
an alternative ending to the disease's conventional conclusion
insanity.
Among the striking differences in this emergent syphilis literature of the 1890's is
the initial figuration of the disease. Upon realizing that he has contracted syphilis, the
main character of Vérola's L'Infamant, Marc Favrot happens upon a poster
advertisement for a medical book (reproduced in its entirety in the novel) by an American
doctor named Purdwey called Des rapports de la lèpre et de la syphilis. The purchased
book, which in the course of the narrative is demonstrated to be the work of a charlatan
rather than that of a reliable physician, nonetheless, has its effect: "Les atroces images qui
illustraient le livre avaient onduleusement jeté sous sa peau un frisson aigu et
comprimant" (89). In Margueritte's novel, the disease itself finds its most developed
image in the pages of a medical book which the syphilis specialist Montai shows his
patient, in an effort to make the latter understand the gravity of his infection, the "hideux
tableau de plaies, rouges, jaunes, violacées, toute une flore monstrueuse" (79) that
menacingly awaits him if he does not seek immediate medical treatment. In Brieux's
play, a similar representational strategy is employed as the unnamed doctor recites to the
"avarié" (the drama's characters have no proper names, highlighting the didactic intent of
the play) the litany of horrifying symptoms of syphilis from one of his teachers'
manuals.20 The subsequent details, rendered in a precise medical vocabulary, are meant to
evoke in the patient the desire to seek treatment so as not to transform his future bride
into "l'éventualité du mal dont vous ne pouvez pas supporter la description" (26). The
reliance of these literary texts on the figure of medical handbooks of varying degrees of
authority to fulfill the extravagant representational exigencies of the popularly imagined
syphilis effectively frames and blocks the potentially transgressive expansion of such a
figure in both story and discourse, suspending the figurai import of syphilis in the
generalized social text.21
The representational shift in French syphilis literature in the final years of the
nineteenth century paralleled a comparable movement in the medical community that
produced an institutional response (treatises, specialized medical and non-medical
organizations, public lectures, international conferences, new proposals of legislative
regulation, etc.) that increasingly emphasized syphilis' transmission through heredity,
thereby stressing genealogical and familial responsibility over the individual's immorality
in non-pro-creative sexual relations.22 Brieux's drama, a late-naturalist morality play

20 Banned in France until 1950, Les Avariés caused a furor wherever it was staged. In England, it was
championed by George Bernard Shaw, who considered Brieux the most important European playwright since
Ibsen. In the United States, Les Avariés was perceived as a didactic play, so much so that Sinclair Lewis
wrote an authorized prose version of the play, so that those who could not see the New York production
would be able to read the novel and benefit from its message.
21 In Philippe's notorious classic, Bubu de Montparnasse, an entire chapter is devoted to the title character's
alarm when he learns of his prostituting mistress' illness. As with other syphilis novels of the period, Bubu's
terror is fueled by the popular image of the disease: "II imaginait des plaies de rouge et suintantes, des
bandages et de la charpie et se voyait étendu dans un lit d'hôpital avec un corps vert et complètement pourri"
(87). Bubu, however, figures syphilis in such a way that allows him to create his own narrative of survival:
"Les accidents de la vérole ressemblent à la prison que l'on peut éviter, ou de laquelle on sort implacable et
fortifié" (96). Philippe's version of the disease, contrary to the reformist syphilis novels of the period, subtly
attempts to subvert the authority of medicine while ascribing the survival of the syphilitic to strength of Bubu's
character.
22 The theme of marital responsibility and syphilis was certainly not the invention of the late-nineteenth century.
Erasmus's 1529 colloquy subtitled "contiugium impar" is most likely the first appearance of this particular
theme. It is a feature of virtually all of the syphilis narratives mentioned in this section. In late-nineteenth
century Victorian England, advice literature had already suggested that a health certificate be provided by the

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 56 Leonard R. Koos

explicitly featuring a "

syphilis to the next gen
reformist revision of th
presents a young, bourge
daughter that he had co
doctor's advice that he po
completed, he nonethele
his own financial ruin), i
turn, infects her wet-
hygienic responsibility,
physician, by virtue of h
a position that can negot
knowledge of the diseas
syphilis untreated (into w
possible alternate narrati
this second possibility d
many doctors and charla
definitive cures). An ac
deflating the potential t
of the doctor expunges
disease even being stripp
of the first, telling les
Bordier, who througho
machineel or manchinee
beach apple) and preside
insanity, brings the no
implies: "L'univers était
The internist's final wo
speeches on the societal
of-the-century mastern
organized medicine "est
visage essentiel" (15)
representational strate
discourse, a textual propo
found its fullest articu
degeneration theory, dep
then, follows the fate of
1890s, and becomes prog
the doctor in such a way
theory. As turn-of-the
reductive, hegemonic s
alcoholism, tuberculosi
degeneration as active a
decline.
The hygenic aphorism of Les Avariés' s doctor, "II faudrait qu'on cessât de traiter la
syphilis comme un mal mystérieux dont on ne doit même pas prononcer le nom." (93),
economically summarizes the fate of the figure in the era of clinical representation. In the
course of the second half of the nineteenth century, syphilis had run the gamut of

bridegroom, partly as a result of the divorce scandals of Mordaunt in 1870 and Campbell in 1886, both of
which involved knowledge of the infection before marriage. For more on this issue in the Victorian context,
see Savage.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France 57

representational possibilities. From illicit, encrypted images to the

of the excessive, extravagant figures issuing from the equation of d
to the representationally therapeutic process of figurai reduction thr
medical discourse's continuum of diagnosis and prognosis,
representational strategies for syphilis traces the discursive and o
the textual topologies of late-nineteenth century literary representa
echo a reflection of Des Esseintes, could create such a perverse
contaminating potential that "l'homme élève, modèle, peint, scul
(198).
University of Mary Washington

WORKS CITED

Balzac, Honoré de. Le Père Goriot. Ed. Félicien Marceau. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Barthélémy, Auguste-Marseille. Syphilis, poème en trois chants. Paris: Giraude
Saint Gervais, 1848.
Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Ed. Claude Pichois. Pans: Gallim
1976.
Benabou, Erica Marie. "Un Mythe collectif: le 'péril vénérien' à Paris au XVIle s
Les Temps Modernes 484 (1986): 30-61.
Bensick, Carole Marie. La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in
"Rappiccini's Daughter". New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1985.
Bentley, Greg. "Coppernose: The Nature of Burden's Disease in Robert Greene's Friar
Bacon and Friar Burgay" English Language Notes 22 (1985): 28-32.
Bernheimer, Charles. "Female Sexuality and Narrative Closure Barbey s 'La Vengeance
d'une femme' and 'Un Dîner d'athées.'" Romantic Review 74 (1983): 330-341.
Brieux, Eugène. Théâtre complet, v. 6. Paris: Stock, 1909.
Conner, Susan P. "Politics, Prostitution, and the Pox in Revolutionary France." Journal
of Social History 22 (1989): 713-734.
Couvreur, André. Les Mancenilles. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1 900.
Cummins, J. S. "Pox and Paranoia in Renaissance Europe." History Today 38 (1988):
28-35.
Donaldson-Evans, Mary. "A Pox on Love: Madame Bovary's Blind Beggar. Symposium
44(1990): 15-27.
Dorveaux, Paul. La Syphilis mentionnée dans les chroniques de la tin du XVe siècle.
Bulletin de la Société Française d'Histoire de la Médecine 12 (1913) 154-159.
Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard et Pécuchet. Ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch. Paris: Gallimard,
1979.
- . Correspondance, v. 1. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
- . Madame Bovary. Ed. Bernard Ajac. Paris: Flammarion, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la clinique. Archéologie du regard médical. Pans:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
Fracastoro, Girolamo. Syphilis or the French Disease. Trans. Heneage Wynne-Finch.
London: Heinman, 1935.
Gautier, Théophile. Lettre à la présidente. Monaco: Sauret, 1993.
Gilman, Sander. Disease and Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Hepp, Alexandre. L 'Epuisé. Paris: Dentu, 1888.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. A rebours. Ed. Marc Fumaroli. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
- . Là-bas. Paris: Pion, 1907.
Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts and Other Plays. Trans. Peter Watts. New York: Penguin, 1964.
Khatibi, Abdelkebir. Love in Two Languages. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1990.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 58 Leonard R. Koos

Lasowski, Patrick Wald. S

Gallimard, 1982.
Leavy, Barabra Fass. To B
New York UP, 1992.
Le Pileur, L. "Gorre et G
Médecine 9 (1910): 217-224.
Lorrain, Jean. Monsieur de Phocas. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1992.
Loti, Pierre. Les Trois dames de la Kasbah (conte oriental). aaint-Cyr-sur-Loire:
Christan Pirot, 2000.
Magre, Maurice. La Montée aux enfers. Paris: Charpentier, 1918.
Marguerite, Victor. Prostituée. Paris: Charpentier, 1907.
Maupassant, Guy de. Contes et nouvelles, v. 2. Ed. Louis Forestier. Pans: Gallimard,
1979.
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Tableau de Paris Ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet, v. 2. Paris:
Mercure de France, 1995.
Nye, Robert. Crime, Madness and Politics in Modem France. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1984.
Pélin, Gabriel. Les Laideurs du beau Paris. Paris: Lécrivain et Toubon, 1861.
Philippe, Charles-Louis. Bubu de Montparnasse. Paris: Editions de la Revue Blanche,
1901.
The Pretty Women of Paris. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996.
Quetel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Rosebury, Theodor. Microbes and Morals; The Strange Story of Venereal Disease. New
York: Viking, 1971.
Sade, D. A. F. de. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Ed. Yvon Belaval. Paris: Gallimard,
1976.
Showalter, Elaine. "Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle." Sex,
Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
Sigsworth, E. M., T. J. Wyke. "A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease."
Suffer and Be Still; Women in the Victorian Age. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1972.
Solari, Dr. La Syphilis au double point de vue individual et social. Paris: A. Maloine,
1899.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday,
1988.
Vérola, Paul. L'Infamant. Paris: Comptoir d'édition, 1891.
Voivenel, Paul. "Le Rôle de la maladie dans la création littéraire (la pathologie
littéraire)." Mes Conférences, v. 1. Paris: Raoul Lion, 1949. 131-149.
Voltaire. Romans et contes. Ed. René Gross. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.
Williams, William Carlos. Kora in Hell. Boston: Four Seas, 1920.
Zedlin, Theodore. France 1848-1945: Intellect, Taste and Anxiety, v. 2. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977.
Zola, Emile. Nana. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1978.

This content downloaded from

137.190.205.24 on Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:23:40 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms