This long piece is going to be part of the Zigzag Lives, Zigzag histories section of the book of pieces - fictions and essays - that I'm in the process of putting together.
Somnambules
Baudelaire: - « singulier
comme les somnambules »
‘Everyone has his sympathies, his weaknesses, his
hobbyhorses; mine are: well preserved old coins and badly preserved young somnambulists.”
– Dr. W. Schlesinger, Neue Freie Press, March 3, 1874
1.
In 1786, a “philosophical”
tale, Le Somnambule, was published by Fanny de Beauharnais. It begins
like this: “A man celebrated in the art of animal magnetism, walking down the
Champs Elysées
in the first week of June, 1758, amused himself by magnetizing a tree. A dear
friend, author of the following text, was, a couple of days later, also walking
down the Champs Elysées and by chance chose to sit down under that same marvellous
tree. My friend found himself in an unparalleled state of content… Since that
moment he sees through all bodies and penetrates the most secret thoughts.”
For those with the eyes to see it, we have, in the person of
the somnambule, the lucid sleepwalker, a metamorphosis of the tale of the ring
of Gyges.
Fanny de Beauharnais is best known, to posterity, as the
aunt by marriage of Josephine de Beauharnais, who eventually married Napoleon. In the 1780s, however, she bore the
distinction of hostessing a very free thinking and celebrated salon, known for
going on late in the night. She wrote verse. She also applied cosmetics
liberally. A poet produced the very malicious verses that combined the two
things: “it was her face that she made/while someone else made her verses.” Did
she laugh? She did appreciate malicious wit. Buffon was one of her guests.
Mercier was one of her guests. Cazotte, the author of Le Diable amoureux, was
one of her guests.
Years passed. The Revolution came. Everybody went to prison
at one point or another. Among the nobles who had attended Mesmer’s sessions a
rumor was passed around from cell to cell. It was about Cazotte. Later, after
Napoleon had drawn the curtain on the Revolution, a man named Laharpe wrote it
all down.
At a party that was like the ones given by Fanny de
Beauharnais, in 1786, Laharpe claimed, everybody was either quipping away like
Enlightenment rationalists or telling dirty stories. In the midst of this
merriment, Cazotte stood up. He called for everyone’s attention. He said, as
you all know, I have the gift of prophetic visions. And he had one at this
party. He predicted that there would be a Revolution (which provoked laughter –
who did not know that there was going to be a Revolution?) and then pointed to
members of the company. To Condorcet he said, you will die in the Revolution
swallowing poison to avoid being taken away to prison and being executed. To
Chamfort he said, I see you cutting yourself 24 times to open enough veins and
arteries to bleed yourself to death in order to avoid execution. He told the
famous Malherbes, the man who eventually ended up defending Louis XVI, you will
be executed. And then he named four others in the room who would be executed.
Then he said the company expected happiness to flow from a Revolution that
would institute the order of Reason, but that all of you will be executed by
people who are moved precisely by Reason, by philosophers who will employ the
same rhetoric that you employ, and would repeat the same maxims of Voltaire and
Diderot as they ordered the executions.
This became a part of reactionary legend. It is the type of
scene, half orgy, half apocalypse, that would be picked up and repeated by the
flunkies in Dostoevsky novels.
2.
On March 2, 1849, Theophile Gautier brought the famous
somnambulist, Madame Rogers, to a meeting of the Haschichin club at the Hotel
Pimodan, which is now the Hotel Lauzan. I walk past that place often. My friend
M. used to have an office space there, sponsored by the L'Institut d'études
avancées de Paris. The meeting of the club was attended by, among others, Nadar
and Delacroix, who noted in his journal: “she has a charming and graceful head:
she played the role of going to sleep, with all the gestures, marvelously. Her
poses, her turns, too, are charming, and made for the painter.” And indeed,
from Delacroix’s time to the time of the Surrealists, there is a tradition of a
sort of voyeurism for the woman in a trance. In the Revolution surrealist there
is a famous series of photos of Augustine, a hysteric in Salpétrière,
who was photographed, under the supervision of Dr. Charcot, by the institute’s
photographer, Régnard.
Gautier had an extensive acquaintance among the somnambules.
His attention was drawn to the subject, perhaps, by Victor Hugo. In 1847 Hugo
was interested in the possessed women of Loudon – an incident from the 17th
century that latter fascinated Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book about it, and Ken
Russell, who made the movie “The Devils” (1971) partly from that book. It also
fascinated Michelet, whose book La Sorcière has a long sequence about
the case. Hugo decided he needed to understand possession, and so consulted a
very famous somnambule of the time: Alexis Didier. Didier and his magnetiseur, Jean-Bon
Marcillet. At around this time Hugo met Madame de Girardin, who initiated him
into “spiritism” – channelling the soul of his dead daughter.
Gautier was also one of Madame de Girardin’s friends,
according to the interesting article on Gautier’s “metaphysical” friendships by
Anne-Marie Lefebvre in the 1993 Bulletin de Societé de Théophile Gautier. Of interest to the psychogeographer of
Paris (“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves”) is the fact that Gautier, in
1853, moved to 24 Rue de Grange Batelière in the 9th arrondissement –
a move that put him smack between Alexis Didier, on 42 Rue Richet, and a
certain Madame Plainemaison, who held court with Alan Kardec, a voyant whose
book on Spiritism had enormous repercussions among esotericists and especially in Brazil, where
he has been commemorated with a postage stamp. Madame Roger herself, along with
her magnetiseur, Fortier, lived not far away, on Boulevard du Faubourg
Montmartre. The Comte d’Ourches, who lived nearby, was apparently a family acquaintance – an old
Mesmerist who, according to the Figaro, surrounded himself with “pretty”
servants to whom he would issue mental orders. Other accounts show him to be a
devotee of the fad for talking tables and dancing furniture, the kind of things
that announced the “spirits” were in the room. Gautier took notes. Material for
novels and stories. It all becomes
material. Spirit into matter.
3.
On August 25, 1852, the Paris police went around and cited nine
somnambule and one magnetizer for violating the civil code article 479, which
forbade making a metier out of “divining, prognosticating, or explaining dreams.”
All of the cited somnambules, including Alexis Didier, the most famous of the
lot, had put up advertising promising to “divine, prognosticate, and explain
dreams” – although on the last head, it was more like they dreamed, lucidly
dreamed, themselves.
The case against Alexis in particular was simple. A Spanish
duchess lost a bracelet. She came to Alexis, whose magnetiseur, M. Marcillet,
put him under, and handed him the Duchesses gloves. Through sympathetic magic
or animal magnetism, Alexis saw, eyes closed, the thief. Saw that he had
escaped into Germany. Saw that before he escaped, he had pawned the bracelet.
Saw the pawn shop. And lo, the bracelet was found in a pawn shop.
The authorities, of course, had witnessed this. They also
denigrated the vision – of course, a jewel thief would pawn the jewels!
And now here he stood, as did Marcillet. With a defender, the
lawyer Jules Favre, who took up the knotty question of article 479. In a brief
overview, he acknowledged the necessity of such a law in the barbaric era of
witches and wizards, who gulled and bullied the populace with superstition and
hocus pocus.
But what of our more enlightened time, under the Emperor Napoleon
III? Here Favre alluded to the immense scientific literature proving animal
magnetism. Here we have a case of actual science, in the person of Alexis.
The judge, acknowledging the power of Favre’s oratory, still fined
the 9 somnambules and M. Marcillet ten francs and five days in jail.
But this was not the end of the case. Appeals were made. Reports
surfaced in the papers. And finally, in December, the judge decided in favor of
Alexis and M. Marcillet. Were strings pulled? In the case of the other members
of the sleepwalking tribe, the sentence still stood.
4.
Queen Hortense was in the direct matrilineal line from the Beauharnais
– Josephine was her mother. Hortense was the mother of a boy who just couldn’t
seem to find himself in the Restoration world that Stendhal depicts in Lucien
Leuwen. Was he a St. Simonian? Was he a politician? His name was Louis, Louis
Napoleon. Hortense, her friends said, was the kind of woman to “consult the
village somnambule”. Was her mother? Josephine, as is well known, retained
certain beliefs from her girlhood in Martinique. A handreader and prophetess, Marie-Anne
Lenormand, was her advisor. When Josephine was thinking of divorcing Napoleon –
the voyage to Egypt, the days alone in Paris – Lenormand read her hand and
advised her not to. Napoleon himself, a
soldier and thus abnormally sensitive to chance and ballistics, consulted was
rumored to have consulted Lenormand, who read his cards and interpreted his
dreams – although when he was emperor, he disliked Lenormand’s presence and
discouraged Josephine from seeing her.
In 1834, Queen Hortense was living in Rome. “One day, a
famous magnetiseur was called in by her, and put into the presence of a Negress
somnambule, who had already produced remarkable phenomena. The somnambule was
quickly put to sleep. Queen Hortense had one fixed thought, and that thought
came from her heart. She believed her son Louis Napoleon was destined to grasp the
sceptre and the sword, fallen from the
hands of the hero in the hour of his defeat. Thus she multiplied inquiries to
penetrate into the future. At last, the somnambule cried out, as though
inspired: ah, I see him happy and triumphant! A great nation will take him as
their leader – an emperor, surely? Cried the mother, excited and breathless.
“An emperor?” replied the somnambule. “Never!” – from a biography of Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte by M.A. LaGuerronière, 1852.
5.
The Dreyfus case featured many subset dramas.
In the 1890s, the somnambule was well on its way to turning into a
hysteric, and magnetising was becoming hypnosis. But the somnambules were not
going away. They have never gone away.
For instance, Léonie.
Léonie Leboulanger, a farmgirl
from Normandy. Worked as a maid. Worked
as a governess. In the villages, she was known for her ability, while in a
state of lucid dreaming, to see lost objects and predict the future. These
things happened. Someone magnetized her. She helped find a “treasure” in the
chateau de Crèvecoeur near Caen. She attracted the notice of the young Dr.
Janet, latter one of France’s most celebrated psychologists. He studied her in
her trance states. Janet’s Léonie was a victim of multiple personality. Léonie
I was the stereotypical peasant. Under hypnosis, Léonie II broke out: she was
gay, ironic, biting.
Yet.
There’s a photograph of her being hypnotised by Dr. Richet,
another famous psychologist of the time, in the Musee Bretagne. The photograph
is all in sepia, Dr. Richet has his back half turned to the camera, he is
making a gesture, his arm out, his hands extended as though in salute, or as
though to pet the magnetic rays that charge the room, towards a woman seated, alone, in a chair that
looks like it was taken from some bourgeois salon, a comfortable chair upholstered
in a flowery print. The woman has a voluminous black dress, and wears a kind of
maid’s cap on her head. The traditional Normand woman. Her face is a little
heavy, her eyes are closed, her mouth is unsmiling, yet she exudes a calm air.
Over to the side, in the photograph, is an inexplicable object, which looks
like a rock covered by a sheet. One wonders what room is this. One wonders what
the man in the foreground thinks he is doing. One wonders if the woman in the chair was traveling
the ether, seeing horrors, seeing joys.
I take my bearings regarding Léonie Leboulanger from an article by Jacqueline
Carroy.
This is a story that begins with doctors. This is a story of the
end of the nineteenth century. The magnetiseur, the somnambule, have been
driven from the ranks of respectable science. In their place, we now have
hypnosis. We now have an etiology of mental illnesses. We now have hysteria.
In the town of Havre lived a certain Dr. Joseph Gibert. Dr. Gibert
knew Janet. He had a practice among important people. The president of France, Félix
Faure. He had his doubts about the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus had been
convicted in 1895. He consulted with Léonie. He wrote to Mathieu Dreyfus.
Dreyfus came to Havre.
It just so happened that Mathieu Dreyfus was an amateur hypnotist.
Mathieu happened to be a rich Alsatian cotton cloth manufacturer as well. And
he was the brother of Alfred Dreyfus.
Mathieu Dreyfus magnetized Léonie. Léonie saw something. She saw
the prosecution hiding certain evidence. She called out, this isn’t right! She
was awakened. Mathieu was impressed. He hired Léonie to be one of the
governesses in his household. In Paris. He had two kids. The boy died in World
War I, fighting in the French army. Léonie went to Paris. A long piece. Bredin,
from L’affair: “He installed her firstly in an apartment on rue de
l’Arcade, with his sister, Mme Cahn. Then he took Léonie in himself, where she
would soon be living. Dr. Gibert patiently instructed his pupil [Mathieu] how
to put Léonie in a hypnotic state. Soon Mathieu put her to sleep for several
hours, sometimes for days. And he gave himself over, with the somnambule Léonie,
to multiple experiments which confirmed him in his belief concerning her
extraordinary talents. Léonie took more and more of a place in the life of the
Dreyfus family. Sometimes she is lucid. Sometimes she is not. Mathieu asked her
to “follow psychically” certain officers. “Often, solely by contacting for a
certain length of time my hand in hers, she perceived my physical state, my
moral state (if I was in a good or bad mood), sometimes my thoughts, which were
not always about the affair.” Mathieu persuaded himself that he possessed the
power of suggestion. He tried experiments on Léonie at long distance.”
And what did Mathieu’s wife think of all this?
In the meantime, Dr. Gibert was active. He wrote Faure a letter about
the hidden evidence Léonie had seen. Was it true? Faure, Gibert told people,
admitted it. When Gibert died, all of this was in his papers. On March 24,
1899, the historian Gabriel Monod, his friend, published an account of the
somnambule, Gibert, Gibert’s talk with Faure, Faure admitting it. Faure
immediately denied to the papers that he had admitted it. The anti-Dreyfusards
immediately jumped on the somnambule aspect of the story. The pythoness, they
called Leonie.
Mathieu Dreyfus wrote about the sessions with Léonie
in his journal, which was not published until 1979. It was all there:
the session, the somnambule’s vision, her calling out: “what are those pieces
that they are secretly showing to the judges, don’t do that.”
The anti-dreyfusards mocked, but they had been mocked. Zola’s
article in L’Aurore had noted the low level of Dreyfus’s accusers: From the
point of view of truth, Du Paty de Clam, who had led the first interrogations
of Dreyfus in 1894, appeared like the ideal target and it is in part why,
doubtless, his part in the affair was overvalued by Zola as well as Jaurès. Concerning
Du Paty de Clam, Zola wrote : : « Le commandant Du Paty de Clam led
them all, hypnotised them, for he was interested in spiritism as well, and
occultism, he conversed with spirits.” The Dreyfus side presented itself as
dry, scientific, factual.
Léonie crossed these wires. Who was talking to spirits now?
The record of her life is a
very one-sided thing: it consists of her trances with Janet and with Dr. Gibert
and with Mathieu Dreyfus. Those hours, those days, those psychic stalkings,
those handholdings. She was a somnambule infrequently, this was not a gift she
took lightly, this was not a vector into celebrity. When did she die?
6.
In the same year that the Normand somnambule was seeing in a dream
the corrupt framing of Alfred Dreyfus, another story with somnambules was being
followed on the front pages of the German papers.
7.
When we last see him, it September 5, 1930. He is in Warsaw. Cops
bust into the apartment of a leader of a “sex cult” – narcotics – blasphemous
and pornographic texts – testimonies from nubile young men and women –
suicides. The raid kicked off a Satanic panic in Poland. In a Hamburg paper, on
September 17, under the headline, “Devil Worshippers of Warsaw”, there is a
long and lurid description of the cults practices. The use of narcotics and
long warm baths to weaken the will. The Black Mass. “Wearing only black robes
over their naked bodies, and donning black masks, the groups gathered in the
refectory. On the wall hung a picture of the devil as a goat bestride the
globe. … Three naked women, wearing only masks, lay down under the picture and
formed a triangle.” The high priests Czynski, Czaplin and Nowakowski would
appear suddenly in the room, and then an orgy would ignite.
Czeslaw Czynski. 85 years old. The incident jogs memories. In the
Posen Tageblatt, we read an account by a woman of an incident that happened forty
some years before in the town of Ostrowo, when she was young. Like a draft of
Mario and the Magician, this story.
A small town, Ostrowo, 12,000
inhabitants, then part of the German Reich. A cloth industry of household weavers
– a Catholic highschool. The nationalists in their secret groups, the
businessmen growing paunches, the bourgeois wives and daughters, the side of
town where you can find a woman to read your palm, your tealeaves, your cards. One
day, remembers the Posen Tageblatt correspondent, she joins up with a group of
wives of the officers of the German army garrison, and they walk as the evening
comes down, to the Ostrowo Lyceum to hear a talk on “suggestion”. They were all
excited. Something new! They read about the outside world, they feel bored and
stuck. Something new, though, to think about and talk about. They promised to
wake each other up in the case that one or the other of them gave way to
hypnosis. They pinch each other. They laugh. Given the lack of sensations in
the town, everybody was there. Even the police. Czynski appeared – a rather
handsome man with striking eyes – and proceeded to give a long and dull talk.
At the end of it, he went to what he called the experimental part of the
eventing. He passed out some tickets, and they were passed around in the crowd.
He said the he would put those who received the tickets under a hypnotic sleep.
Soon many of the audience, even some who had not received tickets, were asleep.
He suggested to one very hypnotized boy named Blümel that he would do meet
Czynski the next day at his, Czynski’s, hotel, at 10 o’clock, and would
overcome all obstacles put up to this goal by his way by his parents. Well, it
happened! The parents blocked the doors and forbade their son to leave, but Blümel
threw himself out of his bedroom window and ran to his appointment the next
day, arriving at the hotel at 10. “I know that my friends and I refused to
return to the auditorium after the break, and that the next day, they refused
to let the “experimenter” give another talk… Czynski went from there to
Dresden…”
8.
After the trial was over, the Russian paper, Nowosti, investigated
Czeslaw Czynski and added many facts, or at least legends, about the magnitiseur
who appeared at Ostrow and astonished Europe in his trial in Munich.
Czeslaw Liubtsch Czynski had lived a spendthrift life as a
gambler, supporting himself, at first, by holding seances, aided by a woman
named Eli R., who he had promoted from maid to medium. Then he married a rich
“Jewess”, robbed her of her property of 15,000 rubels, and took off, stage
right. In Berlin he met Justine Marger. The two became lovers, had a child,
held seances and healings in Krakow, Warsaw, Posen, and performed small
miracles, or swindles. The Prussian cops
eventually started pulling him in – then expelled him from Prussia. So the two
took the train for Dresden in Saxony.
Prester Lloyd, a German language paper in Budapest, approached Baroness
B., who was mentioned as one of Czinski’s victims by the Nowosti. Would she
talk?
She did.
Her story is as follows: it all began with one of those little
Baroness problems – her pearl earrings went missing. A friend had told her that
there was a somnambule in town who could help.
Somnambules were well known to be finders of lost objects. And
even though they were not always the most clean or honest looking agents, they
were not, somehow, lowering, as it is lowering to have a policeman sniffing
into one’s affairs.
In 1893, when Baroness B. came to see the little nervous man with
long hair in his eyes, he had not explained his theory to the world, partly
because at this point he was still the magnitiseur, and not the magnetisée. The
latter role was played, in the clinic on R. strasse, by a woman (a stout woman,
Baroness B. called her), Wiecinska, who came with Czynski to Dresden from
Poland. This woman was none other than Justine Marger.
Baroness B. only knew that the Professor Czynski had piercing eyes
and pictures of saints and photos of hysterics on his office wall. In the
waiting room, the company was distinguished. Even some Americans were there. On that first day, she explained her situation
to the Professor. The missing earrings – her earrings – an inheritance from her
dear mother!
She explained that the earrings went missing after she had had a
massage session – her legs, she suffered pains, it seems. Did the masseuse take
them? But how could she, the pearls were in another room.
The piercing eyes, the long hair, leant over the desk, hands
clasped, and listened. He began to question her in broken German. He was, he
charmingly explained, not fluent in the language. She responded in French. He
spoke French! In fact, he had taught French in Poland. In his travels. He had
studied in Paris. Soon it developed that the loss of the earrings was a
subordinate distress. There was the pangs in her legs. There was her sense of listlessness.
There were her dreams.
A number of sessions later, Czynski literally threw himself at her feet. Soon he
was begging her to participate in a “two day hypnosis experiment.” For science!
To seal the pact between them, he gave her a ring.
Thus began the Baroness’s adventures. At one point, she heard
Czynski’s voice, in her head, ordering her to go visit Cosima Wagner at
Bayreuth. Baroness B. went to Bayreuth, visited the round of Wagner houses, and
came back to the clinic in Dresden. None of the Wagners, it turned out, were
home. After having shown herself so obedient, naturally Czynski felt that more
hypnosis was needed. Hypnosis, money, hypnosis, diamonds, hypnosis, intimacy. Baroness
B. “did the most crazy things and felt
she was being dissected alive and all the nerves in her body were quivering.”
This went on until Baroness B. was checked, by her father, into a
mental institute. Her father threatened. Diamonds were given back. But by this
time Czynski had found another Baroness – Baroness Z.
9.
The baroness was highly connected – wasn’t she a relation of some
sort to the Kaiser? At least, she came from a high aristocratic family. Von
Zedlitz und Neukirch. It was her brother that pushed for the arrest, the trial.
Clemens. Very worried he was about Hedwig’s flightiness. Hedwig’s property. The
castle she inherited at Luga. And not so
happy, presumably, that his own
marriage, to Cornelia Roosevelt in 1889, had provoked a lot of press coverage
of their ante-nuptial contract: as if he were, of all things, marrying an
American heiress for her money! Thus, in this psychodrama, a man who had been written
about as though he were after the property of his wife faces a man who was also
written about as if he were after the property of his bride. Although, in the
second case, bride is in quotation marks. Not really his bride. Not really.
And you had to admit, Czynski was a man that a flighty woman, an
unmarried woman in her thirties, a woman whose father had introduced her to the
transcendental world of spiritist seances, might fall for.
‘His exterior helped him: dark hair, fascinating eyes, a well kept
beard, a spotless, almost foppish, mostly black wardrobe, thus taking on the
aspect of a man of the world, the passonate temperament of one of Polish blood,
a baritone voice and the curious charm of his foreign accent and spotty
German!” – From: the Sex Life of Hysterics.
It was in Munich where they held the trial. A jury trial. The
jurors, of course, all men. According to German law, four “laymen” and three “experts”.
In this case, the experts were psychologists. A unique case, and an irresistible one for the
newspaper reader. It had nobility, it had seduction, it had mind control, it
had those experts on psychology and those experts on what was not yet called
para-psychology. After it was over, all the experts wrote about it, as though
compelled. Something about the interface between sex and the fantasy of being
overwhelmed by a mental, a spiritual force outside oneself. Something about
this swindler – as he was called by the psychiatrists, who gave no credence to
his version of things – set all the nerves in the fin-de-siecle Zeitgeit
quivering.
Czynski had incautiously written to Dr. Du Prel in Switzerland,
sending him a pamphlet and a letter. In the letter he had written: “For many
years I have tried, in vain, to persuade people that the hypnotiser has the power
to complete dominate an other person’s mental life [ein fremdes Seelenleben]”.
Du Prel had casually buried the pamphlet and the letter with other
correspondence and papers and forgotten about it until he received another
letter, this one a wedding announcement from Czeslaw Czynski and Baroness von
Zedlitz. He, as it happened, knew the Baroness.
He wrote an account of the case for Der Zukunft. And later
included another account in tome 3 of his, Wanidis, Der Triumph der Wahns, the
one on Arian Sex Religions. He compared Czynski
to Jeronimo Scotto, a sixteenth century magician who put the wife of Herzog Johann
Kasimir von Koburg “under a spell” in the year 1592.
Du Prel had a great interest in the occult, in spiritualism, as
well as in the latest findings from Charcot and the French psychologists.
Albert von Schrenk-Notzing, famous for his scientific explorations
of parapsychology, with a special study of ectoplasmic materialization, also testified at the trial, and also wrote
about the case, in a pamphlet in which Hubert Grashey, another expert at the
trial, jotted down his conclusions about the possibility of the criminal use of
hypnosis given the strength of the individual’s free will. The trial was a most
gratifying opportunity to air certain theories. Dr. Hirt, from Breslau,
testified. So did Dr. Preyer, who was much impressed by the hypothesis of
occult powers. So did Dr. Fuchs, who dismissed all of it as hocus pocus.
Secular trickery would, for him, do – the subtext being that the Baroness fell
in love with a swindler, what is the big deal? – in this as in so many other
cases. Czynski, though not at all happy to be imprisoned,
to have his name impugned in this manner, must have been pleased that his
theories were finally being discussed by serious men. Where had Czynski learned his hypnotic technique? At the
university in Poland where he took a degree in philosophy? Or did he attended
seminars with Dr. Charcot? What about
the document attesting to his medical studies by one Gérard Anaclet Vincent
Encausse, aka Papus? Well, Papus was an occultist, and no right psychologist,
according to the Court’s experts. On the other hand, every village had its
somnambule. Suggestion was in the air. He could have apprenticed to a strolling
magnetiseur, much like he himself.
Suggestion was so much in the air that the prosecution asked for
Czynski not to be present in the courtroom when Baroness von Zedlitz entered and testified, as his power over her, she feared,
would make her confused. As she walked to the front of the court to give her
testimony, she wore a veil. When she testified, she raised it up. She testified
in a “clear and precise voice.” The defence disagreed with taking Czynski from
the courtroom, as wasn’t this a concession to what the court was to decide,
viz., his psychic power over her? but finally agreed that the first half of her
testimony would be in a Czynski-free courtroom, and that he would reappear
after she had testified about the facts in the case.
Everything was complicated by the idea that, by post-hypnotic
suggestion, the subject’s memory of the suggestion, or memory connected with
what was suggested, could be erased. How could the witness testify to what, if
she was speaking the truth, could only be revealed if she was hypnotised again,
to forget the command to forget?
As well, a posteriori, Baroness von Zedlitz was credited
with a modesty and religious sense that was felt to be natural to a single
woman of high rank in her thirties. Late 30s. 39. Was the word, “spinster”? And perhaps she was the woman she was
presented as. Or perhaps her confession that she had been “intimate” with
Czynski was not inconsistent with the sex life she wanted to live. There are so
many levels of assumption, here. There is a struggle that one has to be blind
not to see is a very male, a very patriarchal struggle, and that very struggle
was under stress from the paranormal edges. As Czynski pointed out: “The whole
accusation, could be traced back to the dishonorable and base denunciation of
Freiherr Clemens von Zedlitz, who wanted, in conjunction with her father, to
get their hands on his sister and through his [Czynski’s] incarceration to
seize her properties through threats and intimidation. The jail for me, the
crazy-bin for the daughter…”
This was not a completely unreasonable argument.
10.
In fact, this is what must have happened. Hedwig von Zedlitz
suffered from headaches and stomach aches. On
the 12 of August, 1893, she was living in Dresden and suffering even
more, with it being so hot that summer, than usual. Could she find no relief?
She had seen a report in the Dresden newspaper about a healer who had founded a
clinic on R. Strasse, based on all the spiritually fashionable principles:
massage, homeopathy, electricity and magnetisation. The power of suggestion.
She went to the clinic. She was treated, according to the trial,
at the clinic, at a hotel, and even at her baronial estate in Lubau.
It was all a matter of transference. Wiecinska would be
magnetised. She would hold Baroness Hedwig’s hand. The Baroness would be
magnetised. The pains would be transferred to the somnambule. It was
unclear whether the sessions involved undressing the Baroness, or whose hands
were placed on her stomach to remove the pains. Czynski claimed he did not
touch the Baroness. The Baroness testified to a “pressure” on her eyelids, she
could barely open her eyes.
All of the papers spoke of an “intimate relationship”.
It was in October 1893 that Czynski confessed to the Baroness: he
was in love! He, a poor man, burdened with an unfaithful wife. The Baroness,
who assumed that the doctor was having an “intimate relationship” with his
medium, was surprised. Did the Baroness love him? Or was this feeling in her
the result of post-hypnotic suggestion? He was a poor man, a hypnotist, little
better than a fair ground barker – but he assured her he was a fallen member of
a noble family. Lithuanian nobility, if you will. Hard to look up, not in the
usual registers of the nobility.
She felt for him a certain pity. So she testified. Was she
hypnotized, was she under the “Dusel”? This is the name Czynski and she gave to
her half sleep. A sort of twilight consciousness, pleasant, uninfected with
pain. In this state, she decided to marry Czynski, who on his part said that
first he would convert to Protestantism, then finish divorcing his wife, then
marry the Baroness.
‘The question of whether they had “intimate relations” was
affirmed by the Baroness, who was also asked whether this happened in her half-sleep
state.” She said that this happened because she felt overwhelmed by Czynski –
but she did not feel she did this because of a hypnotic suggestion. In her
view, it was simply a humane gesture.
Czynski then made a few mistakes. In January, the Baroness and
Czynski went to Switzerland. As a couple. They sent out wedding announcements.
Thus, many of the Baroness’s friends and family were alerted to the marriage
for the very first time.
Then Czynski went to Vienna. There, he met a man named Stanislaus
Wartalski, at the Café Central. This Wartalski was a traveling pastor of some
type. A street corner preacher from Warsaw. Czynski knew people. Wartalski agreed to find a pastor for the
nuptials, or, if that did not work, do it himself. In the event, Wartalski, who
presented himself as a regular pastor named Simon Werthmann at the hotel Europäischer
Hof on February 8, 1894, performed the marriage ceremony – a pseudo-marriage,
the papers called it. A pre-nuptial
contract was made – at Czynski’s insistence – which did not exactly shower
Czynski with riches. Czynski
specifically objected to a line in the contract that gave him 6000 marks per
year in the event of the Baroness’s death. A wedding licence – a pseudo-licence
- was signed, the guests toasted, the couple went off to renew their “intimate
relations” in a hotel room.
On February 18, Czynski was arrested. The Baroness was taken in
hand by her father and brother. Was this a matter of protecting Hedwig from a
swindler – or keeping Hedwig’s property for themselves? When Czynski’s attorney
asked the question, Clemens at first refused to answer such impertinence. Urged
by the court, he answered that he only acted out of love for the family.
10.
The jury in the event decided that Czynski did not force Hedwig to
marry him, but he did marry her under false pretences. 3 years in jail was the
sentence.
11.
The theologian Schleiermacher took a somnambule into his
household, Karoline Fischer, who began to rule the household with an iron hand.
There is a long line of Swiss Somambules. For instance, Jenny
Azaela, Mme Schmidt. She had the whole portfolio: ecstasy, telepathy,
clairvoyance, blind vision, the ability to read using different parts of her
body – for instance, her elbow and her navel. The pastor who magnetized her
married her. She had to be magnetized once a day. Died at the age of seventy.
The Jouve couple, in Lyon. The wife was the somnambule, the
husband the magnetiseur. Standard arrangement. They were in court once due to
the fact that their dear friend, Mme Gundrand, left them her fortune when she
died. Question: was she under the suggestion of the magnetiseur?
Freud’s disciple, Ferenczi, met a certain Mme Jelenik, in
Budapest. Unfortunately, to consult her he had to depend on her “violent
looking husband”, her magnitiseur. Ferenczi’s second session with her was in
her bedroom: “a room with windows on the alley and very shabby furniture and an
oppressively unpleasant smell.” What happened when he husband came in and
magnetised her was not very earthshaking. However, she did tell Ferenczi that
while he depended on his master, Freud, Freud also depended on Ferenczi. Ferenczi
invited Freud to meet Mme Jelenik. Freud did not respond to his invitation.
In Paris, according to an old feuilleton, one used to go to the Rue
de la Michodière to find a somnambule. A magnetic salon, on 13 Rue de la
Michodière, was ruled over, in the 1850s, by the wife of philosopher Charles
Renovier. In George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, the narrator ends up in
the clutches of a magnetiseur while staying in a hotel on Rue de la Michodière.
I recently went to that street. I went to, as it were, catch some
glimpse in the ether. The street is now camped on by a theatre, a big BNL
office (under construction) and several Asian restaurants. There is no longer a sign of somnambulism. There
is no longer a sign, even, of Madam Renovier or her husband. I went around the
corner to a restaurant on Rue de 4 Septembre, ordered a wine, and took out a
notebook and waited. But nothing came.
The heart was pumping. I was registering no pain in the old
sensorium. If I looked to my right, I
could see a three people, smiling, drinking beer, talking. If I looked ahead of
me, in the café, I could see two waiters standing by the cash register, and a
woman behind it. The world of work, the world of sociability, the city, the
September sky. Wasn’t this the Sunday of Life? And yet somehow nothing occurred
to me. The charm of the common, the wealth of the common, the commonwealth, in
its ordinary aura, and none of it was reaching me.
I had planned to end this zigzag through the somnambules on Rue de
la Michodière. I was going to include some bit about the Cabinet of Doctor
Caligari. Some shoutout to Cesare. The wig and makeup for Caligari, I had read
somewhere, was vaguely modelled on a photograph of Schopenhauer. And I thought
that could bring this thing to the source of my inspiration, originally, as it
was in reading Schopenhauer’s essay on the “apparent intentionality in the fate
of the individual” that I had read his proof via somnambule of fate and the
absolute determination of the future and thought that would be a good ending, a
portent, an intersigne.
But nothing was occurring to me. I could not tie this together.
So I stared at my notebook.
From where I was sitting, I could walk around seven, ten blocks
and hit 15 Rue Vivienne. The first recorded residence of Isadore Ducasse, aka
Lautréamont, in Paris. In the
psychogeographical field formed by the old Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bourse.
Is there a somnambule in Les Chants de Maldoror? Write that down. Surely. The
anti-encyclopedia, the anti-epic. I thought of a recent article I read about a
supposed photograph of Isadore Ducasse, first published in 1998. It was discovered
in the collection of old books and paintings of a bookstore owner and collector,
an Armenian, who had lived in Paris for decades and then one day simply not
showed up at his bookstore. So some interested party, an employee, a friend,
went to check him out and found him in his apartment, his head in a noose tied
to a radiator, his face unrecognizable from the beating he had received, and
paintings of great value – Picasso, Picabia – on the wall, untouched. Nothing
stolen. He must have had heirs of some kind, they go through his stuff, they
get experts, one of them finds the photograph.
It came from the atelier of A. Ken, who happened to live just a
block from Isadore Ducasse at his last address on Boulevard Montmartre. The
photograph shows a sallow young man, whose glance is downward and not quite
towards the camera. His elbow is on a piece of furniture, one of those chests
of drawers with a mirror behind it that you would always find in the apartments
of young bachelors in Paris in the Second Empire.
Two things stand out. The first his ultra silly haircut, a sort of
modified Prince Valient without the flip curl at the end. Black hair, greased
down. And the second thing was the huge overcoat he wore over a jacket and an
enormous scarf-like tie. A ludicrous combination. He holds, as well, an
enormous top hat. Surely if this is Isadore Ducasse, the entire ensemble is
worn with the utmost irony.
However, the article I read proves conclusively that this is not
Isadore Ducasse. It is a picture of a minor literatus of the late nineteenth
century. Not of the inventor of the end-of-literature literature that begins
with the Chants de Maldoror and is still with us.
Nothing occurs to me to connect this photo, which was in the room
the evening its owner was clubbed to death, with my rather ridiculous theme. Nothing
connects. Nothing connects. I’ve run out of things to say about somnambules. I want
simply to quote Dr. Caligari, in the last scene of the film, when the mad
patient is carried out of his office screaming and the doctor says to himself:
At last I understand his delusion… Now I know exactly how to cure him!
I’ve always thought that was a most sinister line. I’ve never
trusted Dr. Caligari.
