The Surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu : Part 6

Flaubert: A Biography
by Frederick Brown

(Page 6 of 6)

Meanwhile, sons and husbands in their thousands were called up to replenish the Grand Army as Napoleon played out his dream of world conquest with preparations for invading Russia. Between 1798 and 1807, 985,000 men had been drafted, or a thirty-sixth part of the entire population. That fraction now increased dramatically, and so did resistance to conscription. Young men poured acid on their teeth to make them rot, or kept self-inflicted sores open with water and arsenic. They would sooner suffer a hernia or broken leg or even suppurating genitals than risk evisceration by a Cossack. Only hospitals like the Hôtel-Dieu, where Dr Flaubert witnessed many such gruesome casualties, drove a thriving trade.

But for Caroline, the first years of her marriage were, she later claimed, the happiest of her life. On the eve of their first anniversary, she bore Achille-Cléophas a son, whom they named Achille. This event gratified her in more than the usual sense, no doubt. Surviving childbirth once again, this time as mother, not infant, or rather, as mother and infant together, helped right the original wrong. She who had cost her mother her life and robbed her father of sons made amends by presenting her husband with a male heir. Guilt, the expectation of failure, and the specter of abandonment had always been her baneful companions. Now, having created her own family, she was, for the moment, immune to their influence. Motherhood reprieved her from orphanhood.

Furthermore, family finances improved substantially when Dr Flaubert replaced Laumonier as chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu in a succession that had seemed preordained until events of the day came to trouble it. Disabled by strokes, Laumonier was obliged to retire early in 1815, during the brief "First Restoration," which saw Louis XVIII occupy the French throne between Napoleon's exile to Elba and his return for the so-called Hundred Days. With wounded soldiers diverted from Paris's overcrowded hospitals spilling into the Hôtel-Dieu, administrators wanted Flaubert appointed chief surgeon right away but were frustrated by the prefect, a Bonapartist answerable to new masters who wished to impose a monarchist surgeon of no particular distinction.

The prefecture resumed its loyalty after Napoleon's triumphant march across France, Flaubert gained the upper hand again, and the relevant ministry, which had had mountains of nominations to examine, approved his on the day before Waterloo. In a speech proclaiming him chief surgeon, the president of the administrative commission of Rouen hospitals lauded anatomical investigations "wherein the cold remains of men deprived of life are interrogated in order to extract the secret of keeping the living alive" but warned against students insufficiently imbued with respect for the bodies they dissected.

Achille-Cléophas lost no time staking out his domain. With a large bourgeois clientele, he joined the ranks of the affluent, but his main task, which by all accounts he performed devotedly, was to care for the indigent who came from Rouen, its faubourgs, and the villages beyond. As expansive as Caroline was reserved, he flourished in the wards, leading his entourage of students from sickbed to sickbed almost every day, comforting patients and lecturing on their pathology. It was thought that his flair for learned, subtle extemporization went hand in hand with a distaste for the solitary labor of writing, and in fact he never wrote much, except in the pages of his clinical diary. It was also true that as surgeon, teacher, and administrator, he wore enough hats to keep three men well employed.

In 1818 the Flauberts rented a larger apartment conveniently situated on the rue de Crosne and were about to install themselves when Laumonier, who had retained the chief surgeon's quarters after his retirement, died. The hospital became their home, and there they would live for many years, in a somber, graystone pavilion three stories high, which one entered through double doors at 17, rue de Lecat. It had a small courtyard hidden from the street by a trellised wall. To one side stood a shed for the Hôtel-Dieu's horse-drawn ambulance; on the other side, beyond the trellis and its leafy vines, was the building itself, with tall windows on the ground floor admitting what little light visited this enclosure into a kitchen, the doctor's office, and the tiered recesses of a dissection theater. Eating and sleeping above carved-up bodies appears not to have troubled family life. On the second floor were the Flauberts' bedroom, a billiard room, and a large dining room that adjoined the wards. Little Achille surveyed the hospital grounds from the third floor, where low-beamed rooms made up the children's dormitory.

One may speak of children in the plural, for in fact Achille did not often have the third floor all to himself. Next door were transients destined to become wee ghosts, who lived only long enough to knit with the family and, in dying, to rend its fabric. During a nightmarish interval of six years, Caroline lost two sons and a daughter. The girl, named Caroline, was born in February 1816 and died in October of the following year. Thirteen months after this loss she bore a son, Émile Cléophas, who lived eight months, until June 1819, when she was already pregnant with another boy, born in November. Jules Alfred showed greater promise of surviving childhood. He was still alive two years later and presumably old enough to resent the attention lavished upon a newborn brother in December 1821. For more than half a year the Flauberts numbered five, but in September 1822, Jules joined Caroline and Émile in the family netherworld.

The child born on December 12 at four in the morning was named Gustave. On December 13 Achille-Cléophas and two other "informants," a surgical intern and a health officer, presented him to the deputy mayor for the birth certificate that established civil status. On January 13, a Sunday, he was taken around the corner and received by the church in a handsome, eighteenth-century edifice, the Église de la Madeleine, whose clerics had more experience administering extreme unction to inmates of the Hôtel-Dieu than baptizing infants. Present, as godparents, were Paul François Le Poittevin, a rich textile merchant, and Marie Eulalie Vieillot. Absent was the father, Achille-Cléophas, presumably for reasons other than a wish to uphold the reputation he had earned with Restoration authorities of being liberal in his political sympathies.

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.