Delsarte System of Oratory · Chapter 39Episode II
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Some time later, I again saw my worthy cousin, the innocent cause of all my joys. He was a medical student, and came to propose a visit to the dissecting-room. I did not hesitate to accept; the proposal harmonized with my desire.
I did not go, as so many go to the morgue, merely to see dead bodies. No; the curiosity that impelled me, and the avidity with which I pursued the object of my study, was not to be so easily satisfied.
Dead bodies only attracted me when they were--if not dissected--at least flayed. Children break their dolls to see what there is inside; so I, too, wanted to see what there was in a corpse. It seemed to me that under the mutilations which the scalpel had inflicted on the body, I should find the answer to more than one enigma--might solve some of the secrets of life.
The prospect of this visit had the charm of a pleasure party to me. I made it a holiday and awaited the hour with impatience.
But, on arriving, when I found myself in that place chill and gloomy as the tomb; when I felt choked by the mephitic gases that arose from this seat of infection; when I found myself in the presence of a heap of corpses mutilated by the scalpel, disfigured by putrefaction and partially devoured by rats and worms; when, beneath tables laden with these horrible remains, I saw mean tubs filled with human entrails mingled with limbs and heads severed from their trunks; when I felt fragments of flesh reduced to the state of filthy mud, clinging to my feet, my heart throbbed violently, and I was overcome by an indescribable sense of repulsion.
"What," I said to myself, "those shapeless and putrifying masses have lived! They have thought, they have loved! And, who would believe it from the horror and disgust that they inspire, they have been loved, cherished, perhaps adored! Ah! if, as some think, the soul is not immortal, if so many aspirations, so many schemes, so many hopes are to end here--what is man?"
But yet more lamentable food for thought was reserved for me: the spectacle of a ruin yet more profound than those which my eyes could scarce endure, was to appear before me in all its hideousness.
In fact, there reigns in these gloomy halls where no tear has ever fallen, no prayer has ever been heard and no ray of hope has ever pierced--there reigns something yet colder than death, something more unwholesome, more nauseous, more deleterious than the putrid miasmas that infect the air, something more sad to see than the nameless fragments of extinct life, something more loathsome than those filthy and disgusting remnants, something more repulsive than those noses eaten by worms and those empty eyeballs devoured by rats. I mean the cynicism of the dwellers in that place; I mean their insensibility, their indifference and calm heedlessness in the presence of such grave subjects for thought. I mean that lack of perception, that spirit of negation and revolt of which those wretched men make a boast and which they obstinately oppose to all religious sentiment, all principle of tradition or revealed authority. I mean the atheism and ceaseless mockery with which they invariably meet any generous impulse aroused in an honest soul by a healthy faith.
This struck me even more sensibly than the spectacle of death and dissolution which I have striven to describe. Thus the apparently living men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which they exercise their pretended science. They seemed to me ruins far more terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being born of doubt and leading to negation.
If the mutilated and half-devoured bodies that lay before me, filled me with horror and disgust, they, at least, left within me a faint lingering hope surviving death; but the state of blindness of those souls who have lost consciousness of their being and even the feeling of their existence, the shadowy abyss into which they allow themselves complaisantly to glide, the nullity which they adorn with the title of science,--all this filled me with fright, for I felt the doubt and despair into which contact with it would inevitably have plunged me, if, by a special favor, the tone and mimetics, alike self-sufficient and mocking, of these free-thinkers, as they are now styled, had not, from the first, inspired me with aversion for them and a salutary hatred of their doctrine.
And yet, amidst so many repulsive objects, the faculty of observation to which I already owed such fruitful remarks was not dormant in me: I had already asked myself by what evident sign one could recognize a recent corpse.
From this point of view, I made a rapid exploration, and I questioned the various corpses left almost intact; I sought in some portion of the body, common to all, a form or a sign invariably found in all.
The hand furnished me that sign and responded fully to my question.
I noticed, in fact, that in all these corpses the thumb exhibited a singular attitude--that of adduction or attraction inward, which I had never noted either in persons waking or sleeping.
This was a flash of light to me. To be yet more sure of my discovery, I examined a number of arms severed from the trunk; they showed the same tendency. I even saw hands severed from the forearm; and, in spite of this severing of the flexor muscles, the thumb still revealed this same sign. Such persistence in the same fact could not allow of the shadow of a doubt: I possessed the sign-language of death, the semeiotics of the dead.
I rejoiced, foreseeing the service which this discovery would render upon a battle-field, for instance, where more than one man risks being buried alive. I divined, moreover, something of its artistic importance.
I then questioned my cousin and the other students present in regard to the symptomatics of death, and I saw with surprise that, not only had the expression of this phenomenon escaped them hitherto, but that they had no exact and precise knowledge concerning this grave and important question.
There remained, in order to complete my discovery and to deduce useful results from it, to verify the symptom on the dying man. It was important for me to know in what degree it might become manifest on the approach of death.
My wishes were gratified as if by magic, for I was led from the school of anatomy to that of clinical medicine. There a house-student, a friend of my cousin, placed me beside a dying patient, and I examined with the utmost attention the hands of the unhappy man struggling against the clutches of inevitable death.
At first I observed something strange in regard to myself, namely that the emotion which such a sight would have caused me under any other circumstances, was absolutely null at this moment; close attention dulled all feeling in me. I then understood the courage which may inspire the surgeon in the discharge of his duty; and I drew from this observation deductions of great artistic interest.
Now I proved that the thumbs of the dying man contracted at first in almost imperceptible degree; but as the last struggle drew near, and in the supreme efforts made by the patient to hold fast to the life which was slipping from him, I saw all his fingers convulsively directed toward the palm of the hand, thus hiding the thumbs which had previously approached that centre of convergence. Death speedily followed this crisis and soon restored to the fingers a more normal position; but the contraction of the thumb persistently conformed to my previous observations. The presence and progress of this phenomenon in the dying was invariably confirmed by numerous tests which I afterward tried.
Thus, I had acquired the proof that, not only does the total adduction of the thumb characterize death, but that this phenomenon indicates the approach of death in proportion to its intensity. I, therefore, possessed the fundamental principle of a system of semeiotics hitherto unknown to physiologists; but this principle, already so full of interest, must be made profitable to art.
A multitude of pictures, which in former times I had admired at the museum, passed before my mind's eye. I recalled battle-scenes where the dying and the dead are represented; descents from the cross where Christ is necessarily represented as dead. The idea struck me that I would go and verify the action of the thumb in these various representations which the painter's fancy has given us of death.
It was on a Sunday. The Louvre was on my way to the Conservatory, where, as is well known, I lived as pensioner.
I had often traversed the galleries of the Louvre; but now I was armed with a criterion that would give my criticisms indisputable authority.
The ignorance of the fact I sought, even among artists of renown, was not long in being made apparent: all those hands, where they thought they had depicted death, afforded me nothing but the characteristics of a more or less peaceful sleep. The correctness of my criticism may be verified anywhere.
Thus, the mere discovery of a law sufficed to elevate a poor boy of fifteen years, destitute of all science and deploring the deep ignorance in which he had hitherto been left, to the height of an infallible critic in whom the greatest artists found no mercy. I then understood all the power, all the fertility given by an acquaintance with the laws that regulate the nature of man, and in how much even genius itself may be rendered sterile by ignorance of those laws which simple observation would make them acquainted with. But, I thought, my discovery is not complete, for if, thanks to it, I have succeeded in proving that all these pictures of death are false, true only as representing sleep, it is, on the other hand, impossible for me to prove in how far those figures live, in which the painter aims to represent life. I must, therefore, seek the sign of life to complete my standard of criticism.
Suddenly, struck with amazement by the dazzling rays of unexpected light, I asked myself whether the criterion of death would not reveal to me, by the law of contraries, the thermometer of life. It should a priori--it does!
Still I felt that it was not here that I might be permitted to contemplate the vital phenomena attached to the thumb: since death was so badly rendered here, I had strong reasons for thinking that life was no better treated.
I left the museum, then, where I had nothing more to learn; and, to observe living mimetics of the thumb, I went out on the promenade of the Tuileries thronged by aristocratic people. I carefully examined the hands of this crowd, but I was not long in discovering that these elegant idlers had nothing good to offer. "This class," I said to myself, "is false from head to foot. They live an artificial, unnatural life. I see in them only artifice, or an art dishonored by using it to mask their insincerity and artificiality."
The happy idea came to me to mingle with mothers, children and nurses.
"Ah," said I, "in the midst of this throng, laughing and crying at the same time--singing, shouting, gesticulating, jumping, dancing--here is life! If the contemplation of this turbulent and affectionate little world does not instruct me, where shall I find the solution I seek?"
I did not have to wait long for this solution.
I noticed nurses who were distracted and indifferent to the children under their charge; in these the thumb was invariably drawn toward the fingers, thus offering some resemblance to the adduction which it manifests in death. With other nurses, more affectionate, the fingers of the hand that held the child were visibly parted, displaying a thumb bent outward; but this eccentration rose to still more startling proportion in those mothers whom I saw each carrying her own child; there the thumb was bent violently outward, as if to embrace and clasp a beloved being.
Thus I was not slow to recognize that the contraction of the thumb is inversely proportionate, its extension directly proportionate to the affectional exaltation of the life. "No doubt," I said to myself, "the thumb is the thermometer of life in its extending progression as it is of death in its contracting progression."
Countless examples have confirmed this. I could even, on the spot, form an idea of the degree of affection felt for the children entrusted to their care, by the women who passed before my eyes.
Sometimes I would say: "There is a servile creature whose heart is dead to that poor child whom she carries like an inert mass; the position of the thumb drawn toward the fingers renders that indifference evident," Again it was a woman in whom the sources of life swelled high at the contact with the dear treasure which she clasped; that woman was surely the mother of the child she carried, the excessive opening of her thumb left no room for doubt.
Thus my diagnostics were invariably confirmed by exact information, and I could see to what extent the remarks which I had recorded, were justified. I drew from them most interesting applications for my special course of study.
Thus, suppose I had asked the same service from three men, and that each had answered me with the single word yes, accompanied by a gesture of the hand. If one of them had let his thumb approach the forefinger, it is plain to me that he would deceive me, for his thumb thus placed tells me that he is dead to my proposition.
If I observe in the second a slight abduction of the thumb, I must believe that he, although indisposed to oblige me, will still do so from submission.
But if the third abducts his thumb forcibly from the other fingers, oh! I can count on him, he will not deceive me! The abduction of his thumb tells me more in regard to his loyalty than all the assurances which he might give me.
Behold, then, an intuition whose correctness the experience of forty years has not contradicted.
It is hard to imagine the joy I felt at my discovery produced and verified in a single day by so many examples, differing so greatly one from another and of such diverse interest.
All the emotions of this extraordinary and fertile day had so over-excited my imagination that I had great difficulty in calming my poor brain, and far from being able to enjoy the rest which I so much needed, I was a prey to wakefulness in which the turmoil of my ideas at one time made me fear that I was going mad. I then felt for the first time the frailty of the instrument of thought in regard to the faculty which rules and governs it.
In brief, I was--thanks to my double discovery--in possession of a law whose deductions ought to touch the loftiest questions of science and art,--and I was enabled thenceforth to affirm upon strong and irrefragable proof that the thumb, in its double sphere of action, is the thermometer of life as well as of death.