Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

2. The Doctor and the Priest: A Case of Collusion in Madame Gervaisais

2 The Doctor and the Priest A Case of Collusion in Madame Gervaisais
Cliniciens-ès-lettres. Such was the designation that Victor Segalen used for Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in the title of his 1902 medical thesis. The unusual term, with its juxtaposition of the medical and the literary, points to a connection between the brothers’ clinical perspective and their professional practice as writers. Indeed, the persistence with which the Goncourts illustrate medical hypotheses in their fiction, together with their tendency to present their heroes (and more often their heroines) as pathological specimens, suggest that they fully deserved the honoris causa degree that Segalen bestowed upon them. With the possible exception of Germinie Lacerteux, which is regarded as one of the founding texts of naturalism, their six co-authored novels are today valued more as medical curiosities than as literary achievements.1 Furthermore,intheirJournal,theGoncourtsthemselvessummarizetheir accomplishment in medical terms: “We were the first to write about nervous ailments” (2:187). Given this emphasis, it is somewhat surprising to note that a strong antimedical bias runs through their work and that, despite their reliance on medical sources and their apparent adoption of a medical perspective, the Goncourts felt themselves superior to and even in competition with medical practitioners. This supercilious attitude explains what Patrick O’Donovan has termed the “highly negative portrayal of clinical medicine” in Germinie Lacerteux, Renée Mauperin and Soeur Philomène.2 Understandably, perhaps, critics have tended to ignore the antimedical 42 the doctor and the priest dimension of their last co-authored novel, Madame Gervaisais, in which it is infinitely more subtle, but present nonetheless. Even Marc Fumaroli, who brilliantly exposes the duplicity of the novel’s narrative techniques in his genetic study of 1987, asserts that the brothers are “acquiescent where the vocabulary and the formulae of medical discourse are concerned ,” although he does concede, based upon comments in the Journal, that they considered medical science to be nothing more than an “infralitt érature.”3 Through a close reading of Madame Gervaisais, I hope to explain the reasons for the Goncourts’ antagonistic stance vis-à-vis the physician as well as the subtle mechanisms by which it is revealed. Published in 1869, the year preceding the premature death of Jules, the younger brother, Madame Gervaisais has been regarded as a Januslike text, doubly autobiographical in its anticipation of Jules’s demise and in its retrospective interpretation of the death of a beloved aunt, Nephtalie de Courmont, after whom the eponymous Madame Gervaisais is patterned.4 During their childhood, the Goncourts had spent many happy hours in the company of their aunt, an intelligent Parisian woman of means and a refined freethinker, to whose influence Edmond would later attribute his career as a writer as well as his passion for collecting. Nephtalie de Courmont had contracted tuberculosis, that archetypal Romantic sickness, and had traveled to Rome on the advice of her physician, in hopes that the more temperate climate might hasten her recovery. Instead of finding a cure for her physical malady, she had succumbed to the more insidious “disease” of religion, breathing her last on the very day on which she had been granted a private audience with the Pope. The Goncourts decided as early as 1856 to use their aunt’s story as the basis for a novel, and they traveled twice to Rome (in 1856 and 1867) to gather information for their work. The influence of contemporary medical discourse on their rendition of Courmont’s story is palpable, first in the strongly anticlerical tone of the novel, and second in their insistence on the pathology of their heroine’s religious experience. Although the links between religious mysticism and hysteria were not to be fully explored until Charcot’s work in the 1880s, Alexis Favrot had posited a connection as early as 1844 in his medical thesis, De la catalepsie, de l’extase et de l’hystérie.5 Treating ecstasy as a morbid state, the doctor and the priest 43 he had identified two nearly indistinguishable varieties of the illness, l’extase mystique and l’extase cataleptique, both with the same predisposing causes: “an exaggerated love of poetry, science, fine arts, and especially of religion.”6 Favrot had insisted on the body’s withdrawal from contact with the outside world, using the classic example of Saint Theresa’s mystical experiences to outline the symptoms: “One experiences...