The Surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu : Part 4

Flaubert: A Biography
by Frederick Brown

(Page 4 of 6)

The year 1806 proved to be momentous in Achille-Cléophas's life. It started badly. Although he may have been a man of sturdy constitution, and taller than most at five feet nine inches, the obstinate spirit that often drove him beyond exhaustion undermined his health. Spitting blood, he contracted "pulmonary phthisis," or tuberculosis. As it happened, this calamity spared him from further misfortune. He eventually recovered - indeed, soon enough to cast doubt on his confreres' diagnosis - but not before the army found him unfit for military service. Instead of joining the 160,000 Frenchmen who set out for Prussia on October 8, and then amputating limbs at Jena or Auerstedt, he sealed his exemption with an indemnity of sixty-five francs.

No sooner had one twist of fate freed him to pursue a career than another provided him with employment. When a young intern hired as a lecturer in anatomy at Rouen's Hôtel-Dieu unexpectedly recused himself, the hospital's chief surgeon, Jean-Baptiste Laumonier, asked his brother-in-law, Michel Thouret, director of the medical school in Paris, to recommend a worthy replacement. Flaubert's name was put forth, with praise from Dupuytren, who, after enumerating his stellar accomplishments, described him as a friend. "Such, sir, is the assistant I am sending you," he wrote. "I will add, much less to give you a high opinion of him than to secure him a benevolent reception, that he has for several years been one of my special students and friends. For everything you do to further his instruction and career, and to afford him the material ease that a young man as well-bred as he needs, I would be infinitely grateful."

A eulogy published forty years later, after Achille-Cléophas's death, would plant the idea that Dupuytren, fearful of nurturing a usurper, exiled him to Rouen. But this oft-repeated story, which apparently rests upon the conviction that no first-rate talent could thrive in a provincial milieu or happily resign himself to life outside Paris, is questionable. Even if the compliments Dupuytren paid Flaubert were disingenuous, he was still far from being the potentate who held sway over medical France with favors for the weak and letters of banishment for the strong. Furthermore, a year or two in Rouen worked greatly to the advantage of appointees. As Laumonier's surrogates, they enjoyed precocious authority at a major hospital. And under his supervision, they learned how little they had known about human anatomy. Laumonier, who spent several weeks each year teaching in Paris, was a gifted surgeon (even more widely admired perhaps for his wax models, which could have passed muster at the annual Salon had they been sculpted in marble, than for his surgical prowess).

The administrative commission of the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen sought immediate authorization from the prefect to appoint Achille-Cléophas, whose name was recorded by a clerk unfamiliar with Cléophas, father of James the little, as Achille-Cléopâtre. No one on the prefect's staff questioned the new anatomist's ostensible hermaphroditism.

FOUR YEARS passed before Achille-Cléophas obtained his doctorate with a thesis rich in aphoristic prescriptions for pre- and postoperative care derived from the experience he had meanwhile gained at patients' bedsides. Greatly impressed by the young man, Laumonier set him loose to do whatever he could, exploiting his boundless energy, good nature, and obvious talent. For the students enrolled in what had been a rump medical program, Achille-Cléophas organized courses on childbirth, bandaging, physiology, operative medicine, external pathology, surgical procedure, as well as anatomy. With twenty or so gathered around him, he spent hours each week dissecting cadavers, which were not hard to come by in a city whose immigrant peasant population suffered grievously during the economic crises that marked Napoleon's regime. He spent hours more escorting Laumonier on his rounds through the wards, which rivaled those of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris for maladies associated with squalor and poverty.

The Laumoniers occupied a wing of the hospital built in the eighteenth century to accommodate a famous predecessor, the surgeon Claude-Nicolas Lecat, and it was there, soon after he arrived in Rouen, that Achille-Cléophas met Anne Justine Caroline Fleuriot, nine years younger than he, whom he would marry five years later.

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UNLIKE ACHILLE'S family, Caroline Fleuriot's was rooted in Normandy. Her paternal great-grandfather, Yves Fleuriot, a prosperous linen merchant whose wife descended from a family ennobled in 1657, accumulated enough property to live comfortably on income from it, and gave enough away to qualify for burial in a village church near Caen, on the "gospel side" of the nave. Some of this fortune, though apparently none of the entrepreneurial spirit behind it, remained two generations later when Caroline's father, Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot, entered the world. Raised in bourgeois circumstances, he earned a modest livelihood practicing medicine in Pont l'Évêque as a country doctor of the subordinate kind called an officier de santé, or health officer. We know from their compatriot Charlotte Corday that his marriage to Anne Charlotte Cambremer on November 6, 1792, made tongues wag, for the parties, who incurred the displeasure of the vehemently anticlerical Revolutionary government by taking their vows in church with great Catholic pomp, were considered a social mismatch. Anne Charlotte's family had aristocratic pretensions.

Her maternal uncle, Charles Fouet, a king's counselor ambitious of membership in the noblesse de robe, sported the name Fouet de Crémanville. And her father, Nicolas Cambremer, another prominent lawyer, whose claim to the nobiliary particle may have been even more tenuous, styled himself Cambremer de Croixmare, devised a coat of arms, and inhabited a seventeenth-century mansion, the Hôtel Montpensier. What no one doubted was that the Cambremers and Fouets, both favored by the crown with lucrative appointments, formed a quasi-incestuous bond in Nicolas's generation. In 1760, Nicolas Cambremer married his widowed niece, Anne Françoise Fouet, the daughter of his sister Anne Angélique by Charles Fouet, father of Charles Fouet de Crémanville and himself the king's counselor in the jurisdiction of Pont l'Évêque.

Copyright © 2006 by Frederick Brown

About the Author

Frederick Brown is the author of An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau; Père-Lachaise, Theater and Revolution; and Zola: A Life. Twice the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, he lives in New York City.