LETTER XVI.
THE CHOLERA—A MASQUE BALL—THE GAY WORLD—MOBS—VISIT TO THE HOTEL DIEU.
You see by the papers, I presume, the official accounts of the cholera in Paris. It seems very terrible to you, no doubt, at your distance from the scene, and truly it is terrible enough, if one could realize it, anywhere; but many here do not trouble themselves about it, and you might be in this metropolis a month, and if you observed the people only, and frequented only the places of amusement, and the public promenades, you might never suspect its existence. The weather is June-like, deliciously warm and bright; the trees are just in the tender green of the new buds, and the public gardens are thronged all day with thousands of the gay and idle, sitting under the trees in groups, laughing and amusing themselves, as if there were no plague in the air, though hundreds die every day. The churches are all hung in black; there is a constant succession of funerals; and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city. It is very hard to realize such things, and, it would seem, very hard even to treat them seriously. I was at a masque ball at the Théatre des Varietés, a night or two since, at the celebration of the Mi-Careme, or half-Lent. There were some two thousand people, I should think, in fancy dresses, most of them grotesque and satirical, and the ball was kept up till seven in the morning, with all the extravagant gaiety, noise, and fun, with which the French people manage such matters. There was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera-galopade, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the Cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence. It was the burden of all the jokes, and all the cries of the hawkers, and all the conversation; and yet, probably, nineteen out of twenty of those present lived in the quarters most ravaged by the disease, and many of them had seen it face to face, and knew perfectly its deadly character!
As yet, with few exceptions, the higher classes of society have escaped. It seems to depend very much on the manner in which people live, and the poor have been struck in every quarter, often at the very next door to luxury. A friend told me this morning, that the porter of a large and fashionable hotel, in which he lives, had been taken to the hospital; and there have been one or two cases in the airy quarter of St. Germain, in the same street with Mr. Cooper, and nearly opposite. Several physicians and medical students have died too, but the majority of these live with the narrowest economy, and in the parts of the city the most liable to impure effluvia. The balls go on still in the gay world; and I presume they would go on if there were only musicians enough left to make an orchestra, or fashionists to compose a quadrille. I was walking home very late from a party the night before last, with a captain in the English army. The gray of the morning was just stealing into the sky; and after a stopping a moment in the Place Vendome, to look at the column, stretching up apparently unto the very stars, we bade good morning, and parted. He had hardly left me, he said, when he heard a frightful scream from one of the houses in the Rue St. Honoré, and thinking there might be some violence going on, he rang at the gate and entered, mounting the first staircase that presented. A woman had just opened a door, and fallen on the broad stair at the top, and was writhing in great agony. The people of the house collected immediately; but the moment my friend pronounced the word cholera, there was a general dispersion, and he was left alone with the patient. He took her in his arms, and carried her to a coach-stand, without assistance, and, driving to the Hotel Dieu, left her with the Sœurs de Charité. She has since died.
As if one plague were not enough, the city is still alive in the distant faubourgs with revolts. Last night, the rappel was beat all over the town, the national guard called to arms, and marched to the Porte St. Denis, and the different quarters where the mobs were collected.
Many suppose there is no cholera except such as is produced by poison; and the Hotel Dieu, and the other hospitals, are besieged daily by the infuriated mob, who swear vengeance against the government for all the mortality they witness.
I have just returned from a visit to the Hotel Dieu—the hospital for the cholera. Impelled by a powerful motive, which it is not now necessary to explain, I had previously made several attempts to gain admission in vain; but yesterday I fell in fortunately with an English physician, who told me I could pass with a doctor's diploma, which he offered to borrow for me of some medical friend. He called by appointment at seven this morning, to accompany me on my visit.
It was like one of our loveliest mornings in June—an inspiriting, sunny, balmy day, all softness and beauty—and we crossed the Tuileries by one of its superb avenues, and kept down the bank of the river to the island. With the errand on which we were bound in our minds, it was impossible not to be struck very forcibly with our own exquisite enjoyment of life. I am sure I never felt my veins fuller of the pleasure of health and motion; and I never saw a day when everything about me seemed better worth living for. The splendid palace of the Louvre, with its long façade of nearly half a mile, lay in the mellowest sunshine on our left; the lively river, covered with boats, and spanned with its magnificent and crowded bridges on our right; the view of the island, with its massive old structures below, and the fine gray towers of the church of Notre Dame rising, dark and gloomy, in the distance, rendered it difficult to realize anything but life and pleasure. That under those very towers, which added so much to the beauty of the scene, there lay a thousand and more of poor wretches dying of a plague, was a thought my mind would not retain a moment.
Half an hour's walk brought us to the Place Notre Dame, on one side of which, next this celebrated church, stands the hospital. My friend entered, leaving me to wait till he had found an acquaintance of whom he could borrow a diploma. A hearse was standing at the door of the church, and I went in for a moment. A few mourners, with the appearance of extreme poverty, were kneeling round a coffin at one of the side altars; and a solitary priest, with an attendant boy, was mumbling the prayers for the dead. As I came out, another hearse drove up, with a rough coffin, scantily covered with a pall, and followed by one poor old man. They hurried in, and I strolled around the square. Fifteen or twenty water-carriers were filling their buckets at the fountain opposite, singing and laughing; and at the same moment four different litters crossed toward the hospital, each with its two or three followers, women and children, friends or relatives of the sick, accompanying them to the door, where they parted from them, most probably for ever. The litters were set down a moment before ascending the steps; the crowd pressed around and lifted the coarse curtains; farewells were exchanged, and the sick alone passed in. I did not see any great demonstration of feeling in the particular cases that were before me; but I can conceive, in the almost deadly certainty of this disease, that these hasty partings at the door of the hospital might often be scenes of unsurpassed suffering and distress.
I waited, perhaps, ten minutes more. In the whole time that I had been there, twelve litters, bearing the sick, had entered the Hotel Dieu. As I exhibited the borrowed diploma, the thirteenth arrived, and with it a young man, whose violent and uncontrolled grief worked so far on the soldier at the door, that he allowed him to pass. I followed the bearers to the yard, interested exceedingly to observe the first treatment and manner of reception. They wound slowly up the stone staircase to the upper story, and entered the female department—a long low room, containing nearly a hundred beds, placed in alleys scarce two feet from each other. Nearly all were occupied, and those which were empty my friend told me were vacated by deaths yesterday. They set down the litter by the side of a narrow cot, with coarse but clean sheets, and a Sœur de Charité, with a white cap, and a cross at her girdle, came and took off the canopy. A young woman, of apparently twenty-five, was beneath, absolutely convulsed with agony. Her eyes were started from their sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face was of a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a sight. She had been taken in perfect health only three hours before, but her features looked to me marked with a year of pain. The first attempt to lift her produced violent vomiting, and I thought she must die instantly. They covered her up in bed, and leaving the man who came with her hanging over her with the moan of one deprived of his senses, they went to receive others, who were entering in the same manner. I inquired of my companion how soon she would be attended to. He said, "possibly in an hour, as the physician was just commencing his rounds." An hour after this I passed the bed of this poor woman, and she had not yet been visited. Her husband answered my question with a choking voice and a flood of tears.
I passed down the ward, and found nineteen or twenty in the last agonies of death. They lay perfectly still, and seemed benumbed. I felt the limbs of several, and found them quite cold. The stomach only had a little warmth. Now and then a half groan escaped those who seemed the strongest; but with the exception of the universally open mouth and upturned ghastly eye, there were no signs of much suffering. I found two who must have been dead half an hour, undiscovered by the attendants. One of them was an old woman, nearly gray, with a very bad expression of face, who was perfectly cold—lips, limbs, body, and all. The other was younger, and looked as if she had died in pain. Her eyes appeared as if they had been forced half out of the sockets, and her skin was of the most livid and deathly purple. The woman in the next bed told me she had died since the Sœur de Charité had been there. It is horrible to think how these poor creatures may suffer in the very midst of the provisions that are made professedly for their relief. I asked why a simple prescription of treatment might not be drawn up the physicians, and administered by the numerous medical students who were in Paris, that as few as possible might suffer from delay. "Because," said my companion, "the chief physicians must do everything personally, to study the complaint." And so, I verily believe, more human lives are sacrificed in waiting for experiments, than ever will be saved by the results. My blood boiled from the beginning to the end of this melancholy visit.
I wandered about alone among the beds till my heart was sick, and I could bear it no longer; and then rejoined my friend, who was in the train of one of the physicians, making the rounds. One would think a dying person should be treated with kindness. I never saw a rougher or more heartless manner than that of the celebrated Dr. ——, at the bedsides of these poor creatures. A harsh question, a rude pulling open of the mouth, to look at the tongue, a sentence or two of unsuppressed comments to the students on the progress of the disease, and the train passed on. If discouragement and despair are not medicines, I should think the visits of such physicians were of little avail. The wretched sufferers turned away their heads after he had gone, in every instance that I saw, with an expression of visibly increased distress. Several of them refused to answer his questions altogether.
On reaching the bottom of the Salle St. Monique, one of the male wards, I heard loud voices and laughter. I had noticed much more groaning and complaining in passing among the men, and the horrible discordance struck me as something infernal. It proceeded from one of the sides to which the patients had been removed who were recovering. The most successful treatment has been found to be punch, very strong, with but little acid, and being permitted to drink as much as they would, they had become partially intoxicated. It was a fiendish sight, positively. They were sitting up, and reaching from one bed to the other, and with their still pallid faces and blue lips, and the hospital dress of white, they looked like so many carousing corpses. I turned away from them in horror.
I was stopped in the door-way by a litter entering with a sick woman. They set her down in the main passage between the beds, and left her a moment to find a place for her. She seemed to have an interval of pain, and rose up on one hand, and looked about her very earnestly. I followed the direction of her eyes, and could easily imagine her sensations. Twenty or thirty death-like faces were turned toward her from the different beds, and the groans of the dying and the distressed came from every side. She was without a friend whom she knew, sick of a mortal disease, and abandoned to the mercy of those whose kindness is mercenary and habitual, and of course without sympathy or feeling. Was it not enough alone, if she had been far less ill, to imbitter the very fountains of life, and kill her with mere fright and horror? She sank down upon the litter again, and drew her shawl over her head. I had seen enough of suffering, and I left the place.
On reaching the lower staircase, my friend proposed to me to look into the dead-room. We descended to a large dark apartment below the street-level, lighted by a lamp fixed to the wall. Sixty or seventy bodies lay on the floor, some of them quite uncovered, and some wrapped in mats. I could not see distinctly enough by the dim light, to judge of their discoloration. They appeared mostly old and emaciated.
I can not describe the sensation of relief with which I breathed the free air once more. I had no fear of the cholera, but the suffering and misery I had seen, oppressed and half smothered me. Every one who has walked through an hospital, will remember how natural it is to subdue the breath, and close the nostrils to the smells of medicine and the close air. The fact, too, that the question of contagion is still disputed, though I fully believe the cholera not to be contagious, might have had some effect. My breast heaved, however, as if a weight had risen from my lungs, and I walked home, blessing God for health, with undissembled gratitude.
P. S.—I began this account of my visit to the Hotel Dieu yesterday. As I am perfectly well this morning, I think the point of non-contagion, in my own case at least, is clear. I breathed the same air with the dying and the diseased for two hours, and felt of nearly a hundred to be satisfied of the curious phenomena of the vital heat. Perhaps an experiment of this sort in a man not professionally a physician, may be considered rash or useless; and I would not willingly be thought to have done it from any puerile curiosity. I have been interested in such subjects always; and I considered the fact that the king's sons had been permitted to visit the hospital, a sufficient assurance that the physicians were seriously convinced there could be no possible danger. If I need an apology, it may be found in this.